OREANDA-NEWS. March 29, 2011. The design of the Olympic Stadium has again obtained the assessment of the State Ecological Expertise after making some technical adjustments. The UNEP experts have visited the Stadium as well as other Olympic venues and they have expresses their satisfaction with the course of construction.

Gleb Vatletsov, Director of Ecological Support Department of SC "Olympstroy", announced at the meeting with UNEP experts, that the Olympic Stadium, the Large Ice Arena for ice hockey, the Indoor Skating Rink and some other venues will be certified as meeting the requirements of one of the strictest international “green” standards - BREEAM. All other venues under construction shall be subject to additional ecological requirements, besides the obligatory requirements of the Russian environmental legislation, which allows mitigating the impact on the environment”, he said.

All the Olympic venues being constructed in mountain and coastal clusters as well as in the Sochi itself, have won positive assessment by the state ecological expertise. For a number of venues the ecological certification procedure is performed repeatedly due to the fact that the construction of some venues has been divided into several stages and the documentation for each of them may be submitted for the expertise one by one.

The Olympic Stadium with the capacity of 40 000 spectators (responsible contractor – SC "Olympstroy") won a positive opinion of the state ecological expertise in August 2008 (the opinion of the expert commission of the state ecological expertise was approved by the Order of the Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Nuclear Supervision No 648 dated 25th August, 2008), and the construction work is being performed in accordance with this order. The procedure of the repeated expertise, held after insignificant adjustments to the design documentation, has been completed. The positive opinion was approved by the Order of the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resource Management (Rosprirodnadzor) No 145 dated 18.03.2011.

The results of the ecological expertise, performed by Rosprirodnadzor have proved that the design documentation for the Olympic Stadium fully conforms to the requirements, imposed by the Russian Federation environmental legislation. The adjusted design documentation for the training ice hockey rink and the training figure skating center has won positive opinions.