The Olympics and Paralympics will be held in Paris this summer, for which the administration of Paris has taken steps to make the Seine swimmable.
Work has begun to ‘cleanse’ the Seine, first for athletes this year and finally for the public in 2025. More than one and a half billion Euros have been invested in the restoration of Seine.
The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is planned to be held next to Seine.
For the first time in Olympic history, an opening ceremony will be held outside the stadium and organizers expect 600,000 spectators to attend. The river Seine will be used for sporting events such as marathon swimming, triathlon and para-triathlon.
To do all this successfully, it is first necessary to succeed in cleaning the river. One of those involved in this work is a company called ‘Fluidion’. It is a water intelligence agency. The company has developed technology to measure water quality. For seven years, Fluidion measured water quality in the presence of the common bacteria E. Coli and Enterococcus—two of these bacteria are tracking concentrations. The amount of pollution in the water can be understood from this information.
Paris has a sewage system that consists of rainwater. However, during heavy rainfall, the sewage system overflows into the river and large amounts of bacteria are spread in the river water which can be harmful and even cause death.
It is in this context that a material called ‘Black Silicon’ needs to be mentioned. This is what physicists usually call a ‘metamaterial’ or modified substance. That is, its own properties are superior to those found in nature. One of its characteristics is that it is ‘super hydrophobic’, meaning that this ‘black silicon’ is used to trap water droplets and remove debris like a lotus leaf. During research at The National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, titanium dioxide was metafoamed with black silicon to make it a more effective material-mixture to increase the water-purification capacity of black silicon. The material developed in our research has been used by several water-research organizations in the purification of sewage water.
Deputy Mayor Grégoire reminds us that water pollution is a global problem. In recent years smaller European cities such as Zurich, Munich and Copenhagen have introduced urban swimming. There are also attempts to swim in Berlin’s Spree River and Amsterdam’s canals. According to Grégoire, if the Seine can be made swimmable, Paris will be the first major city in Europe to allow swimming in a river within the city. “It’s a dream,” says Grégoire. Making the Seine swimmable should be one of the best examples of pollution control.’’
This plan also has an economic motivation. Clearing the Seine was key to Paris’ victory as a contender for the 2024 Olympics. Olympics is a sporting event where huge amount of money is invested and spent. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics cost $10.4 billion Estimates are that the Paris Olympics will cost more than that. According to a study by the “Center for Law and Economics of Sport” of the University of Limoges, France, the Olympics have already created employment for two and a half million people in France.
If the plan goes ahead, the swimmable Seine could also offer Parisians some relief from the summer heat. In 2019, the temperature in Paris set a record of over 40 degrees Celsius. In this era of global warming, that record can be broken any day!
