Green VI is a not-for-profit wastemanagement and community development organization on the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. In response to Tortola’s lack of recycling program, Green VI developed an innovative way to deal with glass waste streams. Beautiful blown glass artwork is created from a nearby hotel’s empty glass bottles left over from the restaurant and bar operations.
The glass-blowing art studio uses left over french-fry oil from the hotel to heat kilns which melt empty alcohol bottles to create beautiful blown glass artwork, which is intern sold back to visitors. This innovative solution adds value to the hotels waste and sends it home with tourists. While the initiative is not currently large enough to handle the amount of glass coming in, it represents the exact type of thinking required to foster creativity and sustainability through nano-tourism.
Sources: Lewtas, 2017 and Green VI greenvi.org / photo courtesy of Green VI
Example of strategy 6B:
Foster Experiments through Nano-tourism
Nano-tourism can realize best or next practices within crowd co-design:
Nano-tourism is a new, constructed term describing a creative critique to the current environmental, social, and economic downsides of conventional tourism, as a participatory, locally oriented, bottom-up alternative. …. It operates as a social tool to stimulate mutual interaction between the provider and user by co-creation or exchange of knowledge. It is not about scale but is a projected ability to construct responsible experiences from the bottom-up, using local resources. Nano-tourism isbeyond tourism, it is more an attitude to improve specificeveryday environments and to open up new local economies.
Sources: Nanotourism – nanotourism.org and, Simons & Hamer (2019)
