Oh, to Be Swimming in the Seine Once Again!

As part of its winning bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics, Paris, the capital of France, promised to make the once heavily polluted Seine fit for swimming for the first time in a century, and it looks like that promise will be delivered on time.

“Our goal, really a philosophy, is that we have to stop polluting. It’s a major global issue,” says Emmanuel Grégoire, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of urban planning. “By making the Seine swimmable, that is the best of the best examples.”

A total of $1.5 billion is invested in the Parisian portion of the 774-km river to make it suitable for swimming for the first time since it was banned in 1923 due to high levels of pollution. A giant underground rainwater storage tank with a capacity of 45,000 m³ of rainwater – the equivalent of 20 Olympic-size swimming pools – is being built with a sole purpose in mind: hold runoff off water during a rainstorm, thus preventing Paris’ sanitation network from being overwhelmed and discharging untreated waste flow into the Seine – last year alone, 1.9 million cubic meters of untreated wastewater ended up in the river. By 2025, there will be a total of 26 new swimming pools in the Seine with four in the very center of the city. Cleaning up the iconic river could generate $11.4 billion for the economy, create 250,000 jobs, and benefit the environment with the possible revival of fish stocks and the restoration of river foliage.