Green Utopia via Eco-power & Bio-power

This project details the futures of 100 cities across the globe as though they've somehow overcome all environmental challenges and become super-ecofriendly. This month, we highlight the future of Dawai City.

Dawei City sits on the southern coast of the nation of Burma (aka Myanmar). The true size of the city, with some 150,000 residents, is hidden beneath the coconut and betelnut palms that give the city a tropical forest ambiance. The city’s residents are predominantly of Dawei ethnicity, making the city different from most other cities in Burma which are dominated by ethnic Burmese.

The Dawei settled here in the 18th Century to avoid conflict between Burma and Thailand. For 200 years they’d been left alone and developed their economy based on fishing and farming, whose produce they consumed locally but also exported around the nation via a small port near the city.

The Green Utopia of Dawai -- sometime in the future.

As the 21st century proceeds, a massive industrial park project is being pursued very gradually in Dawei City. Here’s two suggestions to make the industrial park super-sustainable and ecofriendly:

Eco-power: all personnel involved in the project, from low-paid workers to general managers and investors, have to ride on electro-generating pedal bicycles when they move around on-site. This provides for two environmental benefits. Firstly, the transport of personnel is done without producing waste gases. And secondly, the electricity for the industrial park is -- at least in part -- produced in an ecofriendly manner as the electricity feeds back into the electricity grid.

Bio-power: everyone involved in the project must grow organic vegetables from within the industrial zone and use it to cook lunch for the workers. This also provides for multiple benefits. Firstly, it gives social proof to all that there is no contamination on the site. Secondly, it decreases the ecological footprint of the park’s labor force. And thirdly, it encourages the factories to be pollution-free.

These suggestions, if hardened into law, will not only make for an eco-friendlier industrial zone, they will also drive small-scale local innovation as people work out how to plan the transportation system, the energy system, and the food system for a new type of Asian industrial city.