Tucked away on another side of Lankanfushi Island, it is a humbling eye-opener visiting the host village and getting a tour of the operations backbone of the resort. Sustainability is a big word, but ideals are often materialised by tiny efforts and orderly systems in place. Gili Lankanfushi is one of the first few resorts in the Maldives to produce its own drinking water. While purchasing water from Male is a common practice, both guests and hosts working on the island drink water packaged in eco-friendly glass bottles. “It reduces the damage to our environment,” says Sidney Viegas, the resort’s assistant chief engineer.
We don’t have the issue of disposing plastic bottles, so that minimises the total volume of waste the resort generates.
Seawater is pumped into a tank with a capacity of 15,000 litres and passed through a maze of systems and membranes, which separates freshwater from salt and sediments. The resulting water is then made potable by a set of filters, which adds natural minerals and kills germs through UV exposure, before it gets piped around the resort. At the bottling plant, a clean air-conditioned hut manned by two workers, some 400 bottles of drinking water are produced a day. Sparkling water, which is made by adding pressured carbon dioxide and chilled, is also popular with guests.