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Meeting Our Board of Directors & Advisors: Thomas Corbin, Founder of Digital Nova
- Erika Makino
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
Describe to us who Thomas Corbin is?
My name is Thomas Corbin, and I'm the founder of Digital Nova. From a very young age, I was always incredibly passionate about sustainability. My career journey, at least initially, was focused on architecture, sustainability, and the carbon emissions of buildings. It would only be later that I would switch my career to software engineering, where I founded Digital Nova.
Why did you join GREEN Hospitality’s Advisory Council?
When I met Lucia Loposova (Executive Director of GREEN Hospitality) a couple of years ago, it was after I had founded my company, and I was hoping to do more in sustainability. She introduced me to the current issues with sustainability in the hospitality industry, and we started brainstorming how we could bring my skills as a software engineer and her background with GREEN Hospitality to start to develop an application that could really make a big impact on local F&B outlets and the rest of the hospitality industry.
Tell us more about this sustainable project that you’ve worked on with GREEN Hospitality?
Something we tried to do is to develop an app that would help F&B outlets to measure, log, and track their waste, and then use those records to help the business book efficient pick-up from recyclers. Through the app, we also wanted to help educate these companies on how they can implement better sustainable practices.
The idea came about as Lucia was running training workshops to help dozens of F&Bs learn to separate and manage their waste at the time. Waste management is one of the big issues in Hong Kong: A lot of restaurants in Hong Kong don't track their waste, and they don't optimise their use of food when planning their menus. Lucia and her team also realised that many F&Bs don't have the space to recycle their waste or the space for different types of recycling bins.
While there is a list of waste collectors and recyclers on the Environmental Protection Department’s website, the list is quite outdated. We tried calling a bunch of them and found that they basically don't exist. For some F&Bs, it's too expensive to pay for pick-ups from recyclers. That’s why we tried to develop the app.
We had a lot of good progress on the app, which became a runner-up in one of the competitions. The main business advantage for this app at the time was enabling F&Bs to make cost savings once the Municipal Solid Waste Charging Scheme came into effect.
And then the government cancelled the scheme. But from the feedback of our stakeholders, we learnt that most of them are eager to become more sustainable but just don't know how to make a measurable difference, and the app we were building could help address that knowledge barrier.
What are some sustainable technologies you would like to see embedded in the industry?
One idea that I really like is a sort of gamified energy usage application. It has been implemented in Hong Kong a little bit, but basically the idea is to measure all electrical usage in a building through smart sensors, and to encourage different groups of people — teams, floors, or units – to try to minimise the amount of energy usage through competition, where the team that minimises their usage the most gets some form of a reward. There would be immediately available data that shows, for example, if your aircon is one degree Celsius hotter, then you'll save X amount of energy. And when you save energy, you can get visual feedback as well.
What are your thoughts on the positive impact of innovation and small businesses on sustainability?
Small businesses, especially tech businesses, can make a big impact on sustainability in the hospitality industry by coming up with simple solutions to problems that people are struggling with – for example, ways to optimise the menu and food portions.
Other tools outside of the hospitality industry are also fantastic. For example, The Ocean Cleanup is doing some amazing things with technology, where they scrape the surface of the oceans and detect all sorts of rubbish that they pick up. Many smaller businesses in Southeast Asia are using similar technology and have cleaned up local rivers.
How do you live sustainably?
At Digital Nova, we work closely with charities that support disadvantaged communities, from those serving individuals with special needs to organisations that help children off the streets and equip them with new skills.
In my own life, I'm an extremely sustainable person. I'm a vegetarian and I try to eat locally. I wash, cut, and clean all of my waste and carry it down to the recycling station. So I do try and live a sustainable life, but I would like to, at some point, build an application that would help people in Southeast Asia or the world to be more sustainable. When I made the switch from architecture to software engineering, one of my plans was to build a map of Hong Kong where people could find sustainable restaurants, suppliers, and the greenest alternatives.
What are your aspirations for the tourism industry in Asia, and how do you think GREEN Hospitality fits within that?
I think GREEN Hospitality's role in that is primarily to educate the industry, to connect the hospitality industry with other players who are doing great things, whether they are suppliers or innovators. What I would like to see in the hospitality industry is a real push all around to try to work together to bring down the carbon emissions of the whole industry.
For example, hotels can not only optimise their energy efficiency, but they can also stop offering single-use plastic and make sure they minimise waste in the gifts they give. Hotels can also really support smaller businesses in Hong Kong. For example, hotels tend to have a lot more space than smaller F&B outlets do, and they could effectively become a focal point of recycling centres, where smaller F&Bs that pay a fee can deposit their waste for collection.
We need more ideas like that, where different levels of hospitality can all start to work together and make a bigger impact, because right now they're extremely fragmented.
Watch a short clip on Thomas's journey
