After climbing one of the world’s highest mountains, a Maltese inventor returned home to face another challenge – competing for the international Good Entrepreneur Award.
Engineer Marco Cremona is one of the three finalists for the prestigious award, organised by Allianz insurance and CNBC news agency, that aims to recognise ideas that help create a greener future.
This week a CNBC crew flew to Malta to film a short documentary on Dr Cremona and his Hoter invention, which recycles 80 per cent of waste water and was shortlisted from more than 200 entries.
The crew made it to Malta in time to film Dr Cremona’s return from the Challenge 8000 mountain climb last Friday. Dr Cremona is one of the three team members who aim to be the first Maltese to climb Mount Everest next March.
As part of the training for Everest, towering at 8,850 metres, in August the team embarked on a preparatory climb and scaled Mount Cho Oyu, part of the Himalayans range. They reached the summit on September 24.
“The day we reached the summit was doubly important for me. We had reached the mountain peak and, later that day, my wife informed me via satellite phone that I had been chosen as one of the three award finalists,” Dr Cremona said.
Before leaving for the Him-alayans, Dr Cremona had been shortlisted as one the 10 finalists. He was aware the top three would be selected at the beginning of September, while he was away on the climb.
Back then he was concerned that, if he made the final three, he would have to give up the award because of the climb. The problem was that, according to the award procedures, the three finalists were to be filmed by the CNBC crew in September and he would not make it to Malta in time.
Despite the difficulty of the decision, he had already made up his mind to give up the award since he did not want to disappoint his Challenge 8000 team members, Robert Gatt and Gregory Attard, with who he had been training for months.
But to his delight, once he was selected as a finalist, the CNBC crew was willing to accommodate Dr Cremona and rescheduled filming until after the climb. They were in Malta last week and filmed the Hoter process as well as snapshots of the inventor’s lifestyle.
Dr Cremona will be competing against two other men from the UK. Matthew Holloway came up with an eco-friendly air conditioning system named Artica, while Craig White is proposing to build carbon negative homes, schools and offices to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings and their operational energy use.
The series premiers on CNBC across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia on November 2 and the winner will be announced on November 26 in the series finale.
The winner will receive €250,000 in cash, insurance support and airtime.
www.goodentrepreneur.com