Earth Hour honours partners, participants

SINGAPORE — Recycling plastic bottles in exchange for green products, organising weekly vegetarian-food day for schoolchildren, proposing the “I Will If You Will” Challenge Week to promote recycling, and holding photo collage competitions were some of the initiatives that won this year’s Earth Hour Awards.

During the awards and appreciation ceremony held today, the award winners were applauded for their creativity and the impact of their initiatives on sustainability.

This year’s Earth Hour saw 5,000 members of the public taking part — a 12.5 per cent increase from last year’s event — and nearly 350 organisations and landmarks participated by switching off their lights for the hour. Participants also contributed energy to the sustainability effort by dancing for two hours on an installation of 40 Pavegen tiles, which converted their kinetic energy into electricity to power an outdoor movie screening.

For the first time, the World Wide Fund for Nature Singapore released data on the carbon footprint for Earth Hour 2013. Through surveys, the carbon emission from transportation of participants and equipment was found to be 14.71 tonnes in total, enough to power six five-bedroom flats for a year, according to Mr Derek Ong, Director of Olive Ventures, which was responsible for monitoring and managing Earth Hour 2013’s carbon impact. WWF-Singapore will off-set this carbon emission by installing biogas units in households in Nepal.

On the future direction and priority of the Earth Hour movement, Mr Andy Ridley, CEO and Co-Founder of Earth Hour, said: “When we started Earth Hour, it was very much about climate change, but we were also thinking about how to get issues of the environment onto a much broader stage and how to involve people in specific outcomes.”

“We’re already starting to crowd source activities: We’re already, in a disorganised and fairly random way, starting to see people organise themselves and share their stories through social media. There are opportunities for us to make that better organised.”