A COMPANY from Oxford has been commissioned to advise how to reduce the carbon footprint of the London 2012 Olympics.

Best Foot Forward, which employs 15 people at its offices off Magdalen Road, East Oxford, was recently employed to footprint TV chef Jamie Oliver’s latest culinary adventure so that the celebrity chef could offset the emissions of his new Channel 4 series as he travelled around the US.

Now managing director Paul Cooper said his company would be working with the Olympics’ organisers right up to 2012 to help reduce the sporting showpiece’s carbon footprint.

He said: “You can’t reduce it to zero for the Olympics, because that would mean telling people not to come.

“The Olympics has set broad boundaries, by including spectator travel, athletes’ travel and building the stadium when calculating its carbon footprint.

“You can see, for example, that half of the impact is about building the stadium.

“This can be reduced by changing the type of concrete used and other things.

“At the moment, the broad total for the Olympics, including building the stadium, is 3.4m tonnes.

“That’s the carbon equivalent of 300,000 people’s emissions for a year.

Mr Cooper said the average carbon footprint of a UK citizen was 12 tonnes per year.

Best Foot Forward was founded in 1997 to design and develop ways of measuring and communicating environmental impact and sustainability and to act as consultants on these issues.