Straggly-haired, Australian-accented Michael Ma from resort and nightspots group Indochine looks every bit the tree-hugging greenie he professes to be.
The green streak began in him long before bringing your own shopping bags to the supermarket and being vegetarian became cool. And ever since Mr Ma started Indochine 11 years ago, his restaurants have abstained from serving shark’s fin, blue fin tuna, yellow fin tuna, sturgeon and caviar. ‘Some of these fish were not yet on the endangered list when we started. Now, almost all of them are,’ he tells BT. ‘Caviar has recovered somewhat, but we’re still not going to serve these types of food until the natural stocks bounce back.’
The passionate collector of fish has a soft spot for sharks. That may explain why he reviles those restaurants that serve them to gourmands in shark’s fin soup. At a dinner held during Indochine’s annual Green Festival, he said the dish was the ‘stupidest’ thing a restaurant could serve because ‘shark’s fin tastes like nothing, and all you’re eating is double-boiled chicken soup, corn starch and crab or whatever meat’s in there’.
He even brought in a shark to the now-closed Indochine branch at Wisma Atria to ‘showcase the shark to the public in all its beauty’. This move, however, was not appreciated by everyone and he received a letter from the Divers’ Association boycotting the shark-as-exhibit idea. ‘I think they misunderstood my message. I’m a diver myself, and all I wanted to do was to show they’re not like (the creatures in the movie) Jaws. They’re really not dangerous creatures, and they don’t deserve people eating them.’ Then he throws in a whammy only a diehard conservationist can: ‘Did you know that 90 per cent of the shark population has been eliminated?’
Every year for the past four years, Mr Ma has held a Green Festival that raises awareness and funds for a conservation society. This year, he aided International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), throwing two gala dinners at his Forbidden City restaurant in Clarke Quay and Waterfront restaurant at Empress Place in November. Another similar dinner this month will again be laced with the anti-shark’s fin message.
Making money isn’t at odds with being mindful about the environment, says Mr Ma, whose Indochine Waterfront took the Asia Responsible Entrepreneurship Awards’ Green Leadership Award. ‘How to solve it is by bearing in mind sustainability, doing business in a responsible way,’ he says. One way that Indochine does this is to emulate nature. ‘In nature, everything’s a cycle. There is no wastage. It’s Man who creates waste.’
Peer into Indochine’s piping and there are heat-exchange cooling systems where the hot air generated by the air-conditioning is used to heat the water in the group’s establishments. Mr Ma also opts for flooring that’s made of artificial wood and recycled plastic. The latter doesn’t require varnish, which Mr Ma says helps reduce the toxic chemicals being used in his hangouts. ‘I paid more for these things, but because they’re well-designed, they last longer. I don’t need to close shop for maintenance work, lose business days to do re-varnishing and the like.’
Indochine is known for its chi-chi furnishings, which are 200 to 300 years old, another instance of Mr Ma’s stylish take on recycling.
Indeed, nothing is too dear to be spared from being recycled in the Indochine group. After the company vacated its Wisma Atria outlet, Mr Ma ordered the shopfront tempered glass window to be re-used as a tabletop. It now covers the precious alabaster marble that is the long table front and centre of Indochine Waterfront restaurant at Empress Place. ‘We needed a cover for the marble, which is easily scratched. We made it more fun and usable because people can relax using the table,’ he says. At the Green Festival gala dinner held there, guests danced on the tabletop.
The recycling zeal is not confined to Singapore. At the group’s resort in Phuket, Thailand, Mr Ma also composts the carbon-based food products from the restaurant and sends the protein-based ones to pig farms as pig feed.
While not everyone is conscious about everything that can be reused, reduced and recycled, ideally, says Mr Ma, they should be. ‘The aim of businesses and consumers should be to think about the material they use,’ he says.
He believes that if consumers are more aware and support alternative energy companies more fervently, eventually the economics of it will come full circle and reward the pockets of the man in the street. ‘Right now, these guys (the clean energy companies) don’t have the economic numbers to support their business. It’s not feasible at the moment because their turnover isn’t there yet,’ he says. But once there are economies of scale - and that will only come when people and companies really look at and change the way they live and consume - alternative energy companies will be able to lower their prices, benefiting all consumers, he says.
