Press News

Budapest, November 17, 2008

Magyar Telekom, Merlin Energy and the Vegyél vissza! (Switch Back!) program are joining forces to organize the first „Responsibility -Positive Energy” Sustainability Day on November 21. The event is designed to raise awareness of those solutions, opportunities and activities that serve sustainable development. The full-day event hosted by Péter Novák will be held at Millenáris Teátrum. Sustainability Day professionals and opinion-makers include Iván Bojár (Octogon), László Cseh (Olympic athlete), Péter Geszti (media guru), Gábor Kürti (Critical Mass), György Pataki (Védegylet), György Simó (Magyar Telekom), Balázs Tömöri (Greenpeace), György Mihály (Fészekrakók).

The event wishes to deliberately emphasize positive messages and energy: it presents positive examples and models, innovative trendsetting initiatives, Hungarian and international ideas, genial inventions and everyday trivialities. „Our objective is to show how many people have already invented responsible, yet great and trendy things, how many opportunities we have in hand, and to experience that we too can do something for sustainable development,” – Péter Novák said.

In addition to the presentations and dialogs, professionals, lay people, students and artists will address individual responsibility in everyday life, opportunities offered by alternative energies, possible was of reducing travels, new technologies spreading in the automotive industry and architecture, as well as the future of reused products or dilemmas of consume or not consume. The organizers try to make the hard-to-catch theory of sustainability tangible: visitors can test drive a Honda Civic hybrid car, Napszakács (Sun Cook) will present itself, and there will also be demonstrations of a wind wheel, solar cell, domestic compostation technique, a recycled textile workshop and an ecofarm.

Admission is free of charge subject to registration on the website http://fenntarthatonap.info and visitors are also requested to bring a PET bottle that will be used by a participating artist to make a sculpture. The afterparty will be held in the Merlin Theater where conference guests wearing a wristband may enter free of charge.

Sustainability Day events will be transmitted on the web too. Web viewers can also ask questions from the professionals.