Sundrop Jewelry News
The question everyone asks: How can you melt glass with sunshine?
January 09 2018
Whenever I'm telling someone about Sundrop Jewelry I invariably get the question: "Wait, what do you mean - sun-melted glass??"⠀⠀Actually, I mean exactly that! I use a giant magnifying glass to focus sunshine to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (for reference, most types of glass melt at around 1,600°). The focused light makes a hot spot about 1 cm wide, and I use it to melt strips of bottle glass and stained glass into dainty, elegant teardrops. The end of the glass strip starts to melt in the hot spot, then, pulled by gravity, starts to drip and cools in the air.⠀It doesn't get...
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Recycled bottle jewelry - Amp up your recycled style for Earth Day!
April 10 2017
One of the most frequently asked questions about my eco friendly jewelry is, “Is this recycled bottle jewelry?” As with so many things, the answer is “It depends.” In this case, it depends on the color of the glass. All the glass I use in making my eco friendly jewelry is already colored. Glass bottles come in a fairly limited range of colors - mostly blues, greens, and browns - and I love using these to make my recycled bottle jewelry. But, you won’t find many pink glass bottles in your recycling bin (and if you do find one, the color is just...
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Are sterling silver earrings hypoallergenic?
January 25 2017
"Am I allergic to sterling silver earrings?" you ask? Like so many things, the answer is, "it depends." Is sterling silver hypoallergenic? Sterling silver must be at least 92.5% pure silver, with the remaining 7.5% filled in by another metal. Most of the "fill" is copper (another soft, but non-allergenic metal), with a tiny bit of something else to help the soft metals keep their shape and not get damaged. Sometimes, that other metal is nickel. Quite a few people are allergic to nickel. However, often the other metal is something benign to most people - zinc, tin, boron, lithium,...
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Tree free paper? Reducing the environmental impact of running a business.
January 11 2017
As an eco friendly jewelry designer, I’ve worked hard over the years to reduce the environmental impact of Sundrop Jewelry itself. Using recycled sterling silver, colors made from recycled glass bottles, and, of course, using sunshine to melt the glass! This week on the blog I’m digging deep into the environmental impact of plain old printer paper. There's no way around it - running a business requires paper. Lots of it. No matter how much we try to "go digital" there are still packing slips & invoices, cover letters and paperwork to print, sign and return... And that’s not taking...
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Recycled jewelry: sustainable style and casual elegance
August 10 2016
What does "sustainable style" mean to you? At its most basic, sustainability means doing things in a way that can continue indefinitely - not using up resources faster than they can be replenished, or contaminating the world for ourselves and others. But what comes to your mind with the phrase? The problem I have with so much of today’s “sustainable style” is that the emphasis is so much more on “sustainable” than “style”. So much of what is made sustainably is too blatant for my taste - its practically shouting, “See! I used to be a bicycle chain!” or soda pop can, or whatever. Don't...
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Lowering our environmental impact with sustainable packaging
June 29 2016
There's an environmental impact to everything, even solar-powered, eco friendly jewelry. Now I'm taking a look behind the scenes at sustainable packaging. Eco-Friendly Jewelry As an eco friendly jewelry designer, I’ve worked hard over the years to reduce the environmental impact of Sundrop Jewelry itself. Using recycled sterling silver wherever possible (which has grown increasingly available over the past decade - most of my designs now use 100% recycled silver!), introducing more colors of recycled glass, and, of course, using sunshine to melt the glass! Sustainable Packaging I also feel that Sundrop Jewelry has a responsibility to be equally eco...
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Sometimes, Less is More: Eco Friendly Jewelry
May 11 2016
It's been a while since I talked about Sundrop Jewelry's mission statement, and why I design eco friendly jewelry. I know, the phrase "mission statement" sounds so corporate-feel-good-talk-while-really-maximizing-profits. But I really do believe in the idea that less is more. Eco friendly jewelry - Eriantha Earrings in kelly green, made from recycled Reeds Ginger Brew bottles! The core value behind Sundrop Jewelry is living lightly on the Earth. Sundrop Jewelry is just one example of the amazing things that can be done with less... less trash from the glass bottles we melt down & repurpose, less toxic waste spewed into the environment by...
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Argentium silver - what IS it, anyway??
April 14 2016
When I talk about Sundrop Jewelry to people, what jumps out is always the glass - the vibrant translucence, the repurposing of empty bottles, the “no way!” awesomeness of using a giant magnifying glass and sunshine to make jewelry.What doesn’t strike people is the other material in a piece of jewelry, which frankly has a much larger environmental impact that anything to do with glass. Silver. Turquoise Bohemian Earrings, wrapped in recycled sterling silver wire, with recycled Argentium® sterling silver ear hooks. Since the very beginning of Sundrop Jewelry, in 2005, I’ve wanted to make the transition from using standard sterling...
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Green Hosting
November 17 2011
Are We Green? I am ashamed to admit that until recently I had not given any consideration to the energy used by our website. In all our research into reducing our ecological footprint, I hadn’t even thought to look into it! However, that changed when I received an email recently in response to our blog posts researching the impact of our jewelry: “Have you looked into the environmental impact of your website? I have been looking at mine and was shocked to find out how much energy servers use. I have come across some hosting companies in the US that are 100%...
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Environmental Impact Summary
May 24 2011
Our information on the environmental impact of Sundrop Jewelry is getting a bit lengthy, so I thought I’d put together a summary of our current position. Sundrop Jewelry uses recycled glass, silver, and paper.Sundrop Jewelry is handmade with the following recycled materials: Glass: Certain colors are made from recycled liquor bottles, while other Sundrop colors are made from stained art glass. Sterling Silver: All sterling silver wire we use is 100% recycled. We have not yet been able to find a source for recycled silver ear wires or recycled necklace chains. [Update: now we have!] Paper: Jewelry cards are printed on 100%...
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Silver Necklace Chains are Back!
May 23 2011
Turquoise Pendant on 18″ sterling silvercable chain Silver necklace chains I am happy to report that we have brought back our sterling silver chains for Sundrop Jewelry’s necklaces and pendants! Pendant necklaces now come on a delicate 18″ sterling silver flat cable chain, while our more elaborate Three-Sundrop Necklaces hang from a spiraling 18″ sterling silver double rope chain. Environmental Impact From an aesthetic perspective I am delighted we have returned to silver chains for our necklaces. However, I am somewhat ambivalent about the idea for other reasons. From an environmental perspective, silver chains are the worst offending components of Sundrop...
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Recycled Glass – pick your favorite liquor
April 09 2010
One of the most common questions we get is, “Is the glass recycled?” Although it turns out that the glass has a smaller environmental impact than other materials in a pair of earrings, I certainly understand how recycled glass provides a more intuitive feeling of environmental consciousness than being able to say that they came on a smaller, recycled paper card, for example.Invariably the next question is “Which colors are recycled, and what glass do you use?” We use Bombay Sapphire Gin bottles to make our ‘Water’ color Sundrops Skyy Vodka bottles turn into ‘Cobalt’ Sundrops Various screw-top beer bottles are used...
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What's Not In a Pair of Earrings
March 08 2010
Other Materials So far, we’ve concentrated on the impact of making a pair of Simple Earrings and getting them to the final customer – hopefully you! ;) That’s reasonable, given that these earrings are by far our most popular items. However, other pieces of jewelry contain some additional materials we haven’t yet discussed. Necklace Chains Given that we know the silver in our earrings is more wasteful than any other component (paper, glass, printing or rubber), necklace chains are the elephant in the room. There are 0.54 grams of silver in a pair of Simple Earrings, but the 18″ (un-recycled) silver...
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Complying with CA's Prop 65
February 09 2010
Example of a Prop 65 warning label Recently, a California store expressed interest in carrying Sundrops if we could say our jewelry complies with the state’s Proposition 65 (the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986). Prop 65 lists twenty-one pages of chemicals known to cause cancer, and is the reason for the tags you sometimes see on appliance cords and many other things. The Good News Lead was the easy one; most items are labeled if they contain lead. Figuring out whether any of the other myriad of proscribed chemicals were present was much more difficult. I spent...
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The Environmental Impact of Shipping
January 18 2010
With the rush on our webstore from the recent New York Times article, I figured it was a good time to update our report on the impact of shipping Sundrops. Retail Boxes We recently bought new boxes for mailing our webstore orders. Two years ago our 200# white corrugated boxes had no recycled content – now they’re 45% recycled! Also, we decided that we didn’t need the boxes to be quite as large, so we went with 4″x4″x2″ instead of 6″x4″x2″, shaving slightly more than half an ounce from their shipping weight. The Environmental Defense Fund paper calculator was helpful...
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Recycled Silver - Now Available!
January 04 2010
...Well, some recycled silver is available. Our primary supplier of jewelry findings, Rio Grande, now sells recycled silver wire in all three gauges we use. After much estimating, calculation, and conversion (thank you to my high school chemistry teacher for stoichiometry!), I determined that of the 15% (by weight) of a pair of carded earrings that is silver, 0.24 grams is silver wire. The other 0.3 grams is the ear hooks, which unfortunately are not yet available recycled. Erin's original post on the impact of un-recycled silver found that silver uses three times as much energy (BTU's) and emits...
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Paper and Printing: An Update
December 21 2009
Back to analyzing the environmental impact of Sundrop Jewelry... Our old jewelry cards Erin's orignal post about paper calculated our impact using the Environmental Defense's Paper Calculator. Our original cards were nothing special in terms of environmental friendliness, so we used the default national averages for paper (pulp composition, bleaching process, etc.). Doing the same calculation today gave me slightly lower numbers than Erin reported - the national average is improving! Our new, improved, better-than-ever jewelry cards When the time came to order new cards, we did some serious research and ordered something well-nigh perfect: a card half the size...
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Environmental Impact of Shipping Sundrops
January 14 2009
Ever since Hig and Erin took off on their trek to Alaska (and even now they're back) we've been remiss in addressing our company's ecological footprint. So, here's the dirt on shipping Sundrop Jewelry. Wholesale The vast majority of our business is wholesale to small retail stores, who generally order in (small) bulk: 30 pieces of jewelry is probably average. We use the free USPS Priotity Boxes for these orders.The nice thing is that in June they received Cradle to Cradle Silver Certification for their shipping supplies.Although they've boasted about their recycled content in a number of press releases it...
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Recycling Our Silver Scraps
January 10 2008
After 3 years in business, we finally recycled our silver scraps. Not that we used to throw them away, it just took us that long to accumulate enough scraps (tag ends of wire, bent ear hooks, botched wrappings, tarnished pieces, various failed experiments, etc.) to be worth sending in for recycling. How much scrap did we produce in 3 years? 9.19 ounces. I could easily hold it all in my cupped hands. We mailed our scraps to Rio Grande, our supplier of jewelry findings and where we got all our silver in the first place. Rio Grande offers...
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Solar Energy Process - melting with a giant magnifying glass
April 22 2007
Now for the fun part. Once we get all these materials to our studio (a.k.a. my house), what happens to them? single-color sundrop The process is a bit different for single-color and multi-color sundrops. So I'll start with the plain ones. First step: Cut glass into strips. Very little waste in this step. Second step: Melt glass into drops using the giant magnifying lens. Me working at the lens I melt glass with a giant fresnel lens. 41x31 inches, it's about 1270 square inches in area (0.82 square meters). Which means, at 1.4kW/square meter, about 1.1 kilowatts of energy are...
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Silver's Environmental Impact
April 14 2007
Our ongoing investigation into the environmental impact of running a business. Today, we're looking at the environmental impact of silver. Find the rest of the series here. About 15% of a pair of earrings is silver - in the form of ear hooks and wire. And this is the thing I've been most worried about in terms of environmental impact. Over the past couple years I've been very involved trying to fight a mining proposal in Alaska: Pebble Mine. This has led me to learn all sorts of frightening things about the mining industry's track record and impact on the...
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Rubber
April 14 2007
This blog's been empty for a bit. But now I'm back in town after a few weeks in Alaska testing out winter gear for an upcoming 4,000 mile environmental expedition. The last ingredient in a pair of Sundrop Earrings is rubber. We put little rubber ear nuts on the backs of the french ear wires. Partly to hold them on the card for display and shipping, and partly to prevent people from losing the earrings wearing them. Of course, people often don't remember to use them, so we end up fairly often re-matching a mate to someone's lost earring (something...
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Printing
March 15 2007
Ok, so this week I thought I'd talk about printing. But I've been incredibly busy with my other major project in life - an upcoming 4000 mile expedition and environmental advocacy project on the northern Pacific coast, so I haven't learned as much about printing as I'd like. Today, it'll be a pretty quick and dirty calculation. Ink The main thing I was able to find out was that soy-based inks are more environmentally friendly than petroleum-based inks, largely because they produce less Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), which are a hazard both to the environment and to the workers in...
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Paper's footprint
March 06 2007
A pair of sundrops earrings is a tiny product - only about three and a half grams. So the total impact of the raw materials in any one pair of earrings is pretty small - and a big part of it actually comes from the paper card the earrings sit on. Sundrop Jewelry card This card is basically packaging - the end customer probably throws it away immediately (or hopefully recycles it). But without it, we can't display the earrings in a store, or print the information about the cool solar process where people can see it. Paper is big...
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Using sunshine and a giant magnifying glass, I melt recycled bottles and stained glass into elegant droplets, set in in recycled sterling silver.
