Arrived in Kuala Lumpur late yesterday, for the launch today of a prototype affordable house by Bayer’s Project Sunrise and Malaysia’s Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB).
Am delighted that Volans has now been involved for over five years. Some video background here. Also thrilled that Bayer MaterialScience are backing Bertrand Piccard’s round-the-world Solar Impulse project, though am hopeful that Sunrise will have an even greater impact over time. (It was a particular pleasure last year to win a prize in Chile in the glittering wake of the ever-intrepid Piccard.)
The photos above show some aspects of the very successful launch ceremony today in KL. For me, the only fly in the ointment, or polymers headed into the Pacific Garbage Patch, came with the release of a large bunch of balloons to mark the ribbon-cutting. I trust the day will come when such things do not happen at ‘sustainability’ events – though I once went to WWF event in Sweden, of all events and places, where thousands of balloons were released into the skies.
The launch was followed by a fascinating stakeholder session this afternoon with a range of partners in Project Sunrise, among them CIDB, Greenclean Fab India, Habitat for Humanity, Habitat International, Phillips, Podar Enterprises, PU Profile Malaysia, and Square Panels Malaysia.
As a member of the project Sunrise Advisory Board, it was my task to ask some of the ore challenging a questions – though I was impressed how open the partners were not only with upbeat reports on their progress but also with candid views on the barriers they face, both within the emerging Sunrise ecosystem and in the wider economic and political systems.
As a sidebar, on the flight in yesterday I read an extraordinary novel by Laird Hunt, Neverhome – about the American Civil War. I stumbled across the book in the London Review of Books bookshop, around the corner from our office. Blown away by it. Here’s a review in the New York Times that I came across today.
Tweeted a note mentioning that Paul Auster had described the book as “magnificent,’ and suggesting that this was putting it mildly. Heard back from Laird Hunt this morning. What a connected world we now live in – and how totally alien that would have seemed to his extraordinary heroine. I winder when such authors will start to write novels around the dramas of the evolving sustainability revolution?
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