After the media coverage of China’s dubious environmental policy around the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, it seems that the Vancouver Winter Olympics are as contrasted in that respect as the two different climates of the respective games.

In Beijing, Chinese environmental policy dominated pre-games media reports, shadowed only by the equally dubious Chinese human rights records, of which much was speculated in relation to athletes – though no problems actually surfaced – and from which the environmental question was in part devised.

Fearing that severe pollution would affect athletic performance, and debating the legitimacy of holding the Olympics, itself a historic celebration of humanity, in a country with a record of repression and oppression, Beijing 2008 proved a breeding ground for armchair philosophies.

No such luck with Vancouver 2010 and the Winter Olympics. A fairly low key event (with a severe lack of snow, bizarrely, in some places) the games have championed physicality over physicality-cum-philosophy.

Little has been spoken, though, of the supposed environmental commitment made by the Vancouver Olympics, in its use of partially recycled materials for its winners’ medals; those winning gold, silver and bronze at this year’s games will receive medals made in part from melted and regurgitated Belgian computers.

Quite in contrast with the smog, smoke and sky-rising metropolis that was Beijing and its Olympics, Vancouver has stayed good to the Canadian stereotype of goodwill by providing ‘gold’ medals which are, partly, of symbolic value only: the Olympic winner’s medals, always more of a celebratory value, have now had their material value reduced, with the scrapped computer parts used in making the medals constituting just under 2% of the medals’ total materials.

Not a bad environmental concession, it would seem. Given the market value of an Olympic medal, though – and given the fact that almost every winner at this year’s Vancouver Games is unlikely to part with their keepsake, cash or no cash – we might question the use of only 2% recycled materials.

Nonetheless, the use of recycled materials in this year’s medals might prove an important shift in environmental practise, in what is one of the sporting world’s most prestigious events.