Indonesia’s first Climate Neutral Hospitality Company

Meet - June 28, 2018

Huge congratulations to Ronald Akili and his team for making this commitment. Green people will live a long time and have good karma!

Potato Head Beach Club and The Katamama Hotel has become the first hospitality company in Indonesia to take the UN’s Climate Neutral Now pledge, to measure greenhouse gas emissions, reduce where possible and offset the rest.

This pledge is one of many being taken across the globe by organizations, companies, events and individuals to curb greenhouse gas emissions in line with the goals of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. The company’s pledge is part of a general shift towards carbon neutrality and sustainability from the global tourism industry, which is responsible for around 10% of global greenhouse emissions, mainly from travel.

The company has for example been able to reduce the amount of waste it sends to landfill by 76% and has established industry benchmarks for further eliminating waste and promoting recycling in Indonesia, said Ronald Akili, founder of Bali-based Potato Head Family, owner and operator of Potato Head Beach Club and The Katamama Hotel.

Read more at UNFCC.

Recently IBUKU and Green School were part of an amazing art installation at Potato Head featuring the work of activist and artist Liina Klauss.

In its ongoing mission to ‘provide good times and do good in the world,’ Potato Head has teamed up with award-winning German art activist Liina Klauss to demonstrate the reality of marine pollution. The artist has created a large-scale installation constructed from over 5,000 plastic flip-flops, all picked up along the shores of Bali’s west coast. Klauss and a small team of helpers amassed the large volume of shoes in a series of six beach clean-ups, while the artwork itself took weeks to build.

“I want to show people a different perspective on what we consider ‘rubbish,’” says Klauss. “Everything we throw away comes back to us (via the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we grow crops and raise animals on). Flip-flops are just one example; there is potential within all these materials we waste and consider worthless.”

To realise this project—a rainbow-hued structure that takes the shape of an ocean wave—Klauss collaborated with two Ubud, Bali-based initiatives. Multi-disciplinary firm IBUKU designed and built the frame from sustainably harvested bamboo, while the Innovation Lab at Green School supplied a ‘thread’ made entirely from melted- down plastic bottle caps for which to attach the sandals.