The 4th SLOW LIFE Symposium, just getting underway on the Thai island of Koh Kood, has an inspirational location. Not only is the island a beautiful and unspoilt setting, the Soneva Kiri resort sets a great example of eco-friendliness to underpin the Symposium’s themes.
The hub of this activity is “Eco Centro”. The resort follows a ‘Waste to Wealth’ ethos. For example, it uses ancient filtration methods that include running the waste water through five filtration areas, removing contaminants and increasing the water quality at each stage. When the water reaches the last stage it can then be used to water and fertilize the fruit, herbs and vegetables growing in the Organic Garden.
Another key initiative of Eco Central is the production of biodiesel. According to Georgie White, Soneva Kiri’s newly-appointed Naturalist, “this is not just about reducing our imports of diesel but to get rid of the 50 litres of cooking oil we produce each day in the kitchens. Instead of disposing of it, we use it to produce biodiesel which we then use for the tractor and the wood-chipping machine. Depending on the quality of the oil, we get 25-30 litres of biodiesel from each 40 litres of cooking oil.”
Looking to the future, White sees her role as improving the eco-footprint of the resort as whole. “I want to consider all our purchasing, where it’s from, how environmentally sound it is, and improve bit by bit everything we bring here.”
This latter point is of course one of the challenges of being environmentally friendly on an island. But White is keen to turn this into a positive. “I’d like to go around Koh Kood and talk to local farmers and try to make even better arrangements whereby they provide us with vegetables, eggs and so on, and we pay them to do it in the best possible way to meet our environmental standards.”
All this, plus a special workforce of African night crawlers producing compost, a project turning waste wood into charcoal through pyrolysis, even plans to recycle glass to make table tops, make this one of the most ambitious eco-programmes of any resort.