Environmental Sustainability » A Cruising Couple

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Day 169: Wine Bottle Glasses DIY

Feb 132012

A pretty cool trick for reusing old wine bottles.

Wrap yarn around the top of the bottle about 3 or 4 times (as shown) and tie a knot.
Take it off and soak the yarn in nail polish remover.
Rewrap the string.
Light the soaked yarn on fire CAREFULLY!
Burn for about 30 seconds while rotating the bottle slowly to heat the glass evenly.
When the flame starts to die, put the top half into cool water and the top should POP off. (be careful of glass and sharp edges)
Sand to remove any rough edges your mouth may encounter.
Enjoy!

Day 91: Clementine Candle

Nov 262011

Learned about a really cool trick you can do with clementines. Apparently they are not only delicious, but they make a pretty amazing clementine candle! All you have to do is cut the skin around the circumference and peel both halves off, careful not to rip the skin. One end should have a “wick” and the other should be bare. Put a decent amount of oil (we used olive oil) in the wick side and let it soak for a minute or two. While that’s happening cut a cool little design in the bare end to let the heat of the candle escape. Once your wick is fully saturated, just fire a match, light ‘er up and you’ve got yourself an all natural clementine candle. Burns for approx. 30 mins, although ours lasted over an hour before we just blew it out.

Natural Spring Water: More Than Just Water

Jun 232011

Around 5:00 pm, five of us squeezed into a truck to make the trek to the mountains outside of San Diego. We spent an hour driving past ripe avocado bushes while the smell of wild sage streamed through our open windows. We were in pursuit of something readily available inside the city; however, we wanted to get to a purer source. Finally we arrived at the perfect spot, pulled the truck to the side of the road, and began to unload. What we sought literally awaited us on the side of the road, pouring out of a spicket, natural spring water.

Natural Spring Water

Our San Diegan host, James, graciously allowed us to accompany him on this expedition into the mountains to partake in his ritual of retrieving natural water. For months, James has been drinking purely wild spring water. Chlorine, fluoride, plastic, chemicals, antibiotics… the list of additives in tap water goes on and on. And even though there are systems to filter most of this out, you can’t really filter out everything. So James made the decision that he only wanted to drink the best of the best. After all, when your body consists of up to 60% water, why wouldn’t you pay attention to what you’re drinking?

What we really wanted to know was what made spring water so different from, say, well water. James says that he prefers natural spring water over well water because essentially spring water has matured. When you are drinking well water, you are drinking water from way down deep in the grown that hasn’t had time to make its way to the surface. Spring water has had more time to naturally filter off extra minerals on its trek to the top. That makes it a purer and more natural source. And bottled spring water? Well, all those companies advertising spring water actually have some leeway in the water they end up bottling, and they can add quite a bit of additives after they extract the water from the ground. Not to mention the fact that the water is sitting in heavily-chemicalized plastic bottles. Again, when you’re searching to hydrate with the purest and most natural source available, these alternatives just don’t measure up to natural spring water.

While we had pictured a long and rugged hike to a lake where we would fill our buckets with water and then balance the goods on our head, the actual process was pretty easy. Someone who found the spring installed a spicket, literally producing a sort of running faucet with water ready for the taking on the side of the road. The whole process (because of driving) still takes a few hours, and James devotes every other Saturday evening to retrieving the water he will drink for the next two weeks. He explained that the whole process had become a sort of personal ritual, to go out, immerse himself in nature and appreciate the water that he is putting into his body. We were impressed with this devotion.

While we aren’t sure if we are quite committed enough to only drink wild water, we love the idea of really connecting with nature on such a deep level. If you’re interested in trying something similar, check out Find A Spring. The user-based site will help you locate a natural spring in your own area. One thing is for sure: the spring water we drank with James was absolutely incredible, and you can definitely taste a difference! And James says he feels much better after only drinking spring water for so long.

We’re curious…has anyone found a natural spring in their area, and if so, do you retrieve water from it?

Carbon Conundrum

Apr 042011

By Dan

I bet you’re wondering how an environmental science major can take a 7-week road trip across the US and not feel a tad bit guilty about all the emissions.

Well I do, and so does Casey. So we’ve decided to do something about it. I consulted the EPA Website and did some number crunching to find out the exact impact our cross-country trip will have.

Here we go: for each gallon of gasoline burned, .00892 metric tons of CO2 are emitted. Including the miles driven while being lost–because we will get lost–our trip will more than likely be around 9,000 miles. My stylish yet petrol consuming Volvo station wagon puts out an average of 20 miles per gallon. So here’s the math:

(.00892 metric tons CO2/1 ~~gallon gas~~) * (9,000 ~~miles~~/1 trip) * (1 ~~gallon gas~~/20 ~~miles~~)

I plugged the ratios into my handy TI83 and it displayed a number I found quite surprising. 4.014 metric tons of CO2 will be emitted during our trip! According to the EPA, the average vehicle miles traveled during the entire year of 2007 was around 11,720 miles. I am beginning to understand how epic this road trip is actually going to be. Now that I really feel guilty, there must be some way we can negate our carbon footprint and put our ecotourism ideals to work…..

Pitstop on the 19 hour trip to NYC through the blizzard of 09

Scrolling down the EPA website a little further brings me to a section about planting trees. If you’ve flown recently, you might have been asked if you would like to contribute a few dollars to plant tress and negate the carbon emitted by the plane. This is the same idea. Using the following formula, you can calculate how many new trees would be needed to offset the carbon from your miles traveled. On average, medium growth coniferous trees, over 10 years in urban environments, uptake .039 metric tons of CO2 per tree. SOO

(4.0185 ~~metric tons CO2~~/1 trip) * (1 tree/.039 ~~metric tons CO2~~) comes out to:

103 trees grown for 10 years in urban environments to make a 9000 mile road trip carbon neutral.

While we are fully aware that this is not a perfect system, planting trees seems like a pretty good way to make road-tripping a little more sustainable. We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!! Do you think it’s a feasible idea?

And of course, please don’t forget that we are still in a competition to become Isla Palenque’s first island interns, and we still need more votes!! Please click here for the video, information about the internship, and more ways to help if you have already voted