Transcriber: Denise Anagnostou Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Growing up in Bali 30 years ago, there was magic everywhere.
We experienced the most amazing nature here.
The rivers were alive.
Nature was thriving and humming with energy.
And it is those memories and those experiences
that make me passionate,
that make me work on environmental solutions.
We've been challenging the status quo.
There's this common belief that environmental solutions
are expensive, time consuming, and complicated,
and our team has been working on measuring and monitoring resource consumption
to somewhat challenge the tourism industry,
to be their friends
but to also hold a mirror up against their face
and to show them that we can all drastically improve.
Environmental management is a team effort.
It takes everyone to participate.
And to get a team to work together, you need to build trust.
And to build trust, you need accurate information.
You need data and you need storytelling,
the beauty of it.
We've been collecting data and working on properties
to show them
that it doesn't need to be complicated,
it doesn't take a long time,
it's very affordable,
and return on investments comes very fast.
Bali's been in a constant tourism development boom
since I've been a child.
The last decade's been really extreme.
We're now at, in 2019, we're at over 100,000 rooms.
That's hotel rooms.
We now have over 5,000 hotels in Bali.
And on top of that, we have thousands of restaurants,
beach clubs, homestays,
amusement parks,
and 730 Balinese villages.
So there are seven hotels for every Balinese village on this island.
The majority of this development is in the south, as we all know,
and everyone is competing for the same resources.
Everyone needs water, everyone needs energy,
everyone needs a place to put their waste,
everyone needs our biodiversity,
everyone needs materials.
There's a strain on this island that is ongoing
and coming to a certain tipping point.
Energy growth - 10% on average every year.
We are in a freshwater crisis,
and we simply consume more water than we have.
In fact, we are in a 13% deficit,
and our rivers and water bodies
are going dry.
And beautiful waste -
we have eight landfills like this in Bali.
And there are thousands of trucks going to these landfills every day,
the major problem being that no one separates their materials
and it turns into waste.
Materials can, in fact, be re-integrated into the economy,
but waste can only get dumped,
and we can't work fast enough:
the trucks keep coming, and coming, and coming.
So what's the good news in all of this?
The good news is that we've been working on solutions.
We've spent the last five years as a team, with my two partners,
Maitri Fischer and Wayan Lim.
We've been working on showcase properties to challenge the status quo
and to show the tourism industry
that they can, in fact, cut their resource consumption in half,
and that it doesn't have to come at a huge cost.
Take this luxury resort for example.
Just focusing on energy,
they were using classic distance heaters for their villa pools.
We changed those to heat pumps.
Heat pumps provide air conditioning and heating at the same time.
We insulated the piping,
we insulated the balancing tanks to reduce heat losses,
we combined pool pumps with fountain pumps,
and we asked simple questions
like "Does a pump really need six hours to clean a pool?"
No, it doesn't.
So why isn't it running four?
We changed the freon in the air conditioners to coolant,
we upgraded their electricity connection,
and then we installed some solar PV on the driveway.
The entire investment paid off within under one year.
And then the second year,
the hotel saved over $100,000 on their electricity costs.
This is a huge success,
and that money could be reinvested into other solutions:
in villages or in other properties.
But there's so much value to be found in these properties;
there's so much that we can do.
Take this beach club for example -
focusing on water.
Savings in water are extremely hard to find.
But what we do is we install submetering stations.
We use a simple tool that you can get in any hardware store.
It's called a water meter.
And we install it in all kinds of places,
and then we accurately monitor the water consumption,
and we can pinpoint where the water is going,
who's using it -
the restaurant? is it going to the bars? is it in the pool? -
and we start to see patterns,
and we can see how much water this property is consuming
with the people that are flowing through it.
We establish a baseline,
and then we start to implement savings strategies.
At this beach club,
we reduced the amount of water needed for every flush.
We installed aerators on the taps - those are water-saving devices.
We fixed some small leaks that no one ever found
because they didn't have the right methods.
We even built a recycling loop for water
to recycle used toilet water back into the gardens
and reuse it for watering.
And since 2018,
this water park has saved over 45 million litres of water.
That is enough drinking water for 60,000 people for an entire year.
That's one property.
And they save money doing this: 70,000 dollars a year.
And the investment paid off in seven months.
With this water park, we've been working together for nearly three years now.
And we've been really driving energy and water and waste to landfill solutions;
we've been doing biodiversity management.
But just to talk about waste,
we've reduced waste to landfill at this property by 78%.
And we're producing 13 tonnes of compost on site now
every single month.
How did we do this?
By making separation extremely easy,
by setting up prep stations on the kitchen's counters,
by putting coloured bins and buckets for organics,
by adding posters, communications, doing talks, some policy design,
making everyone understand why - why, why, why we're doing this -
and every day, accurately measuring how much waste is going to landfill.
So again, we establish a baseline,
we know how much is going to the landfill,
and then we start to improve,
and then we start to report on that.
We start to tell the teams, and we start to celebrate the success.
A 78% reduction waste to landfill is over 256 tonnes - it's one property.
Across the 25 properties that we've worked on,
together with the [inaudible],
we are in the thousands of tonnes of waste that is not going to the landfill.
And this is all possible by separation at source.
That's all that we need to focus on.
It is the major, major point -
to separate organics and non-organics so that the industry can do their job.
As soon as you mix it, it's impossible to manage.
We've been working on solutions,
and ultimately,
what we've been focusing on is to create showcases,
showcases for the tourism industry,
showcases for everyone to understand,
showcases that teach us that we can cut our resource consumption in half.
And we would like to ask the hotel association
to make a pledge - it's by 2025 - to cut their resource consumption in half.
I'd love to work together with them.
I'd love to inspire them to do this.
And we would love to inspire the tourism industry in Indonesia
that it's going to be a continuing trend
to use their resources and to use their enterprise
to inspire change
and to empower the local communities to be the leaders of change.
Thank you.
(Applause)