Designer of water attraction at Hong Kong’s Ocean Park on making our fun more green
Sustainability is increasingly a buzzword in theme park design, especially in China given industry’s rapid expansion there, with focus on recycling to reduce energy consumption and waste, such as at new park in Shekou, Shenzhen
Theme parks are not usually considered eco-friendly, with high-octane rides using huge amounts of water, fast-food kiosks and bins overflowing with paper cups, cans and plastic bottles.
But that image could be changing. In the past few years, park operators have been opting for more eco-efficient operations, including non-polluting fireworks, LED bulbs and rides using recycled shower water from their adjacent hotels.
“These places occupy large parts of the land, take up large amounts of natural resources, consume vast quantities of energy and generate huge volumes of waste,” says Jim Scheidel, chairman of the board of the Cuningham Group in Los Angeles, whose clients include Disney, Universal Studios, Lotte World in Seoul, the Wanda Group in China, and Ocean Park in Hong Kong. “The question is – how do you mitigate the bad influences?”
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It’s a question, he says, that more and more theme park operators are asking themselves, conceding that while they may not be “the champions of sustainability, they are the entertainment leaders who are initiating change”.
Eight years ago, Scheidel founded Tess – the Themed Entertainment Sustainability Summit, an annual gathering of executives from entertainment and theme parks who met most recently in Shanghai in June, just before the newest Disneyland opened there, to discuss cutting waste and energy use.
China, says Scheidel, is a hot market for advances in sustainability, because of the growth in leisure entertainment centres there. “We are hoping to show them what they can do, what the competition is doing.”
It starts at site selection, he says; building city-sized destinations while minimising the environmental impact, using as many native plants as possible in landscaping, and building close enough to population centres to avoid construction of huge car parks.