"Approximately 600 ancient olive trees have been moved and prepared for transplantation as part of a pilot tree preservation programme, the first of its kind in Greece."
NGOs have criticized planners of the Olympic village in the northern suburbs, which will become a community of workers' flats for 20,000 people after the Games, for missing green opportunities.
Haralambidis said organizers should have used only green energy sources. "It's a major scandal not to have solar-powered boilers in the Olympic village."
With one year to go, tens of thousands of promised new trees, bushes and shrubs to soften the Athens urban sprawl have yet to appear.
More than 60 percent of greater Athens is concreted over and Environment Minister Vasso Papandreou admitted in February that Athenians had a negative image of their city.
Pyrgiotis insisted that a new awareness of green issues would be part of the Olympic legacy.
"One of the successes of the Athens 2004 Games has been the incorporation of environmental awareness into practices and planning and the dissemination of environmental expertise and information," he said.
But Greenpeace's Haralambidis was less optimistic, saying: "What Athens has to offer is a lesson in how things shouldn't be done."
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