Six Senses

Made from biosourced materials, SixSenses is a high class resort with a strong environmental policy and sencitizing its clients for greener lifestyle. But for Gary Henden, the general manager of the hotel, this was not enough. He noticed the enormous amount of biowaste produced on the resort – 230 kg each day – and the lack of facilities on the island to treat it. In 2014, he decided to transform an unused land into a farm to fix this : « The Farm on the Hill ».

Unlike the usual farms, the main goal here is not to produce, but to treat the liquid and solid waste generated by the hotel.

It begins with goats : these adorable companions take care of all the landscape waste. Then come the chickens, which gobble up food scraps and pests – such as termites, flies… Finally, ducks enjoy pretty much all the food waste left as their meal. To close the loop, the animals feces is then used as fertilizer.
The farm also features an aquaponic system, a combination of fish and plant farming, which cleans water. On the other side, an oven burns some vegetal waste and turn it into biochar, which is very efficient to catch soil carbon for the resort crops.
The farm also produces its own bio-cleaner and EM Concentrate, a strong fertilizer containing a high amount of microorganisms, thanks to some of the food waste produced on the hotel such as pinapple peelings.
And that’s not all, Six Senses Koh Samui thinks about every detail to be more circular in its everyday services thanks to its farm products : homemade straws from citronella, spa cosmetics from aloevera, …

Many hotels of the island have visited the farm and the concept is spreading across the tourism industry.

As Gary says, « Islands are the places where you experience pollution at its worst : the waste is hidden from the tourists and dumped directly into the ocean. We need to make people aware of it and bring solutions!