We are pleased to welcome Andy Pag to the Royal Geographical Society in Hong Kong, to lecture on "Around the World by Biotruck ", the story of his ongoing 38, 000 km ecopilgrimage in a selfmade biotruck around the world. In this lecture, Mr Pag describes his epic journey, which has just reached Hong Kong from the UK, in a truck that is both made from, and that runs on, discarded rubbish.

Mr Pag converted a scrapyard school bus into an ecohome using entirely reclaimed materials. He then converted it to run on waste fuel, usually used cooking oil, which he has successfully scavenged along the first 26,000 km of his journey from the UK, across Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, to East Asia. From Hong Kong, he continues east, to cross the Americas, to Europe again. Mr Pag's lecture is laced with amusing accounts of driving around the world, including when confused and subsequently embarrassed Indian police mistook his biofuel for bombmaking equipment and arrested him as an international terrorist, while more importantly proving the viability of recycled and alternative fuels.

The concept for Andy Pag's adventure was garnered from the G20's longterm emissions target, namely in order to reduce the risk of a 5°C rise in global temperatures from 50% to 3%, to reduce CO2 emissions to two tonnes per person per year by 2050. Mr Pag wondered what he could do with two tonnes of carbon: his solution for his Biotruck team was to attempt to drive around the world emitting less than two tonnes of CO2. In order to keep to his two tonne emission target, he recycled the scrapped school bus, and as much as possible used reclaimed materials to convert it into an ecohome.

His team then converted the vehicle's engine to run on vegetable oil and installed a filtering system to clean the used oil found along the way so it could be used as fuel. The team also installed a system to convert the used oil to biodiesel to fuel its starting engine. The vehicle has a 1,500 litre fuel capacity which is designed to allow it to travel 8,500km between fuel supplies. But, in practice, the team has found wasted cooking oil wherever it's gone from the UK to Hong Kong.

Andy Pag (Andrea Pagnacco) hails from the UK, where he initially worked as a BBC journalist. His spirit for adventure led him to found a company running vehiclebased expeditions across Africa in 1999, which subsequently offered trips elsewhere in the world. A growing interest in the environment led him to work with the Catlin Arctic Survey measuring climate change in the Arctic. He then decided to investigate alternative ways of powering his overland journeys. Following the success of the first “Chocolate Powered" Biotruck Expedition, from London to Timbuktu, which was independently certified as being the world's first CarbonNegative Expedition, Mr Pag led a 10car rally across Europe powered only by waste vegetable oil scavenged from chip shops along the way, the "Grease to Greece " rally. Mr Pag is an experienced film maker and awardwinning investigative journalist. His present trip has been covered in media worldwide including by the

BBC, ITV, Sky News, CBS, Reuters, The Telegraph, Paris Metro, Spiegel, Le Figaro, Le Point, РИА Новости, O Globo, The Globe and Mail,

the

New Zealand Herald

and

Deutsche Welle

among more than 200 major publications internationally.