Sundrop Jewelry News
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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Carbon footprint of our glass (glass and shipping)
February 27 2007
Last week I talked about the impact of the glass industry in general. Today I'm going to get a little more specific. Bullseye Glass Some of our glass comes from recycled bottles, but most of it comes from the Bullseye Glass Company in Portland, Oregon. Bullseye Glass being made - from their website I emailed Bullseye about their energy usage and was pleased to find that not only were they super helpful, they were a few steps ahead of us in figuring out how to reduce their own carbon footprint and impact on the environment. The chemicals to color the...
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Glass and energy
February 20 2007
What is a pair of sundrops made of ? Well, a scientific scale and some quick calculations tell me that a pair of sundrop earrings weighs about 3.6 grams. Of that, 22% is glass (the sundrops), 15% is silver (wire wrapping and ear hooks), 4% is plastic (ear nuts), and 59% is paper (display cards). I never realized it was quite that much paper! But I'll have to get back to that later. Today, I'm going to talk a bit about glass. 22% glass, 15% silver,4% plastic, 59% paper We work mostly with colored sheet glass we buy from the...
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Digging into the environmental impact of an eco friendly jewelry company
February 14 2007
Sundrop Jewelry is an environmentally friendly, sustainable jewelry business, because we use solar energy to melt all our glass. Or so we like to think, anyway. But is that really true? We definitely do use solar energy to make all our beads, via a very cool giant magnifying glass. But what is the real environmental footprint of our jewelry? Sitting down to think about this, I realized that I know just about nothing about most of what goes into making a Sundrop. What is the impact of manufacturing the different raw materials? What are the costs of getting them here?...
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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.
