Earth Hour makes good use of Spider-Man power in Singapore

SINGAPORE (Xinhua) - Earth Hour, the global environmental campaign, partnered the cast of the Amazing Spider- Man 2 in Singapore on Saturday to encourage ordinary folks to make good use of their power to save the planet by living more sustainably.

The stars including Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone and Jamie Foxx appeared at the annual event on Saturday evening on a floating stage in the Marina Bay, surrounded by the world-renowned waterfront skyscrapers of Singapore.

It is fantastic to participate in an event that "tries to get all these superheros involved around the world where everybody can participate," the film's director Marc Webb said.

"Spider-man is a regular guy, like all of us, and then one day he discovers he has special powers, and he makes use of these powers for good," one of the guests said, calling for people to use their power to save the planet.

The Earth Hour in Singapore saw the decorative lighting on over 60 iconic buildings in the Marina Bay central business district switched off for an hour from 8:30 p.m.

The local unit of World Wide Fund for Nature, or WWF, is also urging people to "use your power" to drive possible change for the environment by pledging one or more four simple acts - turning air-conditioning up by one degree, switching to LED lighting, using fewer plastic bags or taking shorter showers.

There was also an energy floor where members of the public can dance on a colorful mat that turns kinetic energy from their footwork into electricity.

Singapore is now home of the global campaign with Earth Hour co- founder and chief executive officer Andy Ridley based in the city state.

The Earth Hour campaign started as a lights-out event in Sydney, Australia in 2006, and has now spread to involve people in 7,000 cities and towns in 157 countries and territories around the world.

Earth Hour has also gone beyond the 60 minutes of lights-out in recent years. It helped push a Senate bill for the creation of a 3. 4 million hectare marine protected area in Argentina, started a forest in Uganda with over 1 million trees and mobilized more than 127,000 Russians to protect a forest area twice the size of France, organizers of the campaign said.

This year the organizers also launched the Earth Hour Blue, a crowdfunding and crowdsourcing platform for environmental causes. In Singapore, the project Stop the Killing aims to raise $20,000 to stop animal trafficking in Southeast Asia.