/ A water park based on sustainability /

It’s the most famous water park in Bali, in the most famous tourist area of the country, Kuta Beach. And now it has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2033.

First opened in 1993, Waterbom Bali was the brainchild of founder Santo Gulino, who took environment to heart since the very beginning. “I wanted to create a water park which blended in with the existing natural environment,” he said. So from the start he chose to build the water park by integrating the slides around the existing trees, rather than cutting them down. Today the park encompasses more than 5 hectares, where over 50% of the local greenery is conserved, and it features carefully landscaped gardens and water systems proudly representing the beauty of Bali.

Among the greenery, visitors can enjoy 16 rides and attractions, including the Boomerang, a water slide with an enclosed rainbow translucent tube, an almost free-fall and a giant quarter pipe at the end, and the near-vertical drop of the Smashdown 2.0. For their rides, Waterbom Bali has chosen to partner with WhiteWater, who supplied both thrilling rides and lazy rivers. “We are proud to be a 100% WhiteWater product park,” said park CEO Sayan Gulino, son of Santo. “My goal is to make people happy, and working with WhiteWater supports that goal. It’s not about the theming that makes the park, it’s the product the customer is using.”

But the park grew side by side with the popularity of Kuta as a tourist hotspot, and management could see first-hand the problems of over-tourism on the place, and on the environment. “Do you want to wait in line for an hour for a 4-minute ride? No, it’s going to kill the experience,” says Sayan. “More importantly, mass tourism is a detriment to our environment.” So they began to make their sustainability a conscious effort. “Slowly we transitioned our policies, infrastructure and most importantly, culture,” they say on the park website. “We began by measuring our consumption of resources and our waste, seeing where we could improve, then introduced new ways of doing things. We made small changes from adjusting our pumps, taps and irrigation; separated our waste and began in-house composting; eventually we installed solar panels and even created a dedicated sustainability team.” The program was enhanced and formalised in 2016 under the name “Karmic Returns,” with a strict set of initiatives including waste management, and water and energy conservation. 

The next step came last year, for the park’s 30th anniversary celebrations, when Sayan announced the new pledge: “Waterbom aims to be the first Asian tourism business and the first water park in the world to be net zero by 2033. Our energy sources will be 100% renewable, and our business will also be removing more carbon from the atmosphere than we emit.” Achieving net zero by 2023 is not an easy mission, but the park is working with top environmental consultancy agency Eco-Mantra and insight with the Science Bases Targets Initiative (SBTI).

One year later, their achievements are impressive: they reached a 97% recycling rate and reduced the waste-to-landfill rate to only 3.4%. They are also actively transitioning staff transportation fleet to electric motorbikes, currently with a 14% adoption rate. Waterbom Bali’s sustainability milestones were also recognized by the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) 2023 Gold Awards as the Grand Award recipient for Sustainability and Social Responsibility.

“The time is now,” said Sayan. “If we don’t take that aggressive step now when will we, when will anyone… If a waterpark can do it, we will be that standard that anyone can do it.”

Continue reading Games & Parks Industry May 2024, page 8

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