Coming Clean

© Matjaz Krivic

Coming Clean is a documentary feature investigating how countries and companies are essentially washing away the climate sins from the past to create a greener and sustainable future.

All around the globe people are refusing to accept the dismal future of a overheated planet. This is a story about the trailblazers of sustainable energy and how they are transforming their own societies and inspiring others to follow suit.

The oil rich nation of Norway, is cleaning up its act by funneling petro profits into electric transportation and carbon capture. The vast majority of all new cars in Norway are now electric. They have extended this mission to include electric ferries, cargo ships and even light aircraft.

Climeworks in Switzerland is an example of a smaller company taking the lead in the climate business. The company captures carbon dioxide from thin air, and sells it to soda companies like Coca Cola for bubbles in their drinks, and also to greenhouses for fertilizing tomato and cucumber crops.

Krivic has also visited several island’s pursuits of becoming carbon free – from tiny Tilos in Greece, the first Mediterranean island to become energy self-sufficient and carbon negative, to Scotland’s Orkney Islands where they produce more clean energy than their inhabitants can use, producing and using its own Hydrogen and developing marine energy solutions. Iceland, where the world’s first negative emissions plant has begun operation turning carbon dioxide into stone.

With this project, the photographer is displaying that there is ‘some’ hope. His aim is to show inspirational stories where individuals, companies, small societies and whole countries are trying to turn the tide and make a difference for our common future.

The story continues

The examples covered are just the beginnings of a larger story about the future of green energy and climate reform. A larger range of examples would enrich the story with a variety in scale and approaches. Our aim is to explore how Costa Rica has placed the entire country at 75 % carbon free, and we also want to show how the small Danish island of Samsø became totally self sufficient on renewables. Krivic wants to visit Bhutan, a tiny Himalayan nation with so many trees and so little pollution, that it absorbs more CO2 from the atmosphere than it produces. The first and only carbon negative country in the world!

click to view the full set of images in the archive - please remember this is a work in progress.

Award winning writer Bostjan Videmsek has written detailed articles on each of the different locations the photographer has covered.