South America Snow Sessions (SASS) completed its first season of environmental and community projects in the city of San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina with support from a variety of organization including Protect Our Winters, 1 Step, and the One Life crew of professional snowboarders. Participants included Michelle Parker, Mark Abma, Chanelle Sladics, Kjersi Buaas, and Jamie Anderson as well as musicians Cindy Santini and Marc Beauregard, the Green Guide Networks’ Casey Cochran, the Argentine sustainability consultancy Wulcon Energy, and SASS’s own interns, staff, and clients.
The collaboration produced a greenhouse made of recycled plastic bottles for a local school in Bariloche, a biodiesel processor to convert waste vegetable oil into usable biodiesel, and a carbon offset program for SASS clients in the desert Puna region of Argentina through the EcoAndina foundation. South America Snow Sessions hopes that this first season of projects will be the foundation for more substantial and diverse projects in the seasons to come. With the help of POW and 1 Step, SASS hopes to educate Argentina’s mountain communities about more sustainable practices while developing projects that serve those same communities.
“When I proposed the idea in January of doing these projects, I had no idea how many people we would connect with who were really energized to do this kind of work,” said Ryan Dunfee, SASS’s Sustainability Manager. “With everyone from environmental organizations to professional skiers and snowboarders to individuals to the Argentines that we ended up connecting with, we had a huge network of people eager to start tackling these environmental and community issues in South America, and these projects would not have been completed in the short time window we had without them.” With funding help from 1 Step and POW, people ran around town collecting thousands of used plastic bottles for the greenhouse walls, helped build a frame and a compost bin, and helped put together a biodiesel reactor made entirely from parts found around Bariloche. The crew was able to hand over both the greenhouse and the biodiesel reactor to the community by the time they left in mid-September.
The greenhouses were given to Secondary School No. 321 for use in a mentoring program where high school students teach primary school students how to grow and care for budding trees. The saplings are then used to reforest an area near the Cerro Catedral ski resort that burned down several years ago.
The biodiesel reactor was also transferred to a group of local Argentines working on their own biodiesel project. These Argentines will train Bariloche’s only recycling organization, the self funded Asociación de Recicladores de Bariloche, on how to use the reactor so that they can both recycle another waste product while lowering their fuel costs and environmental impact. Finally, SASS was able to develop its own carbon offset program for clients through the EcoAndina foundation of Argentina, which consisted of developing small-scale solar projects in the remote northern desert region of the country known as la Puna.
“We’re thrilled at the amount of work that was done in Bariloche this winter - the collaboration amongst everyone involved was amazing and it all really addressed the needs of the community and the environment,” said Chris Steinkamp, POW’s Executive Director.
“This was the first year for everyone involved doing work in Argentina, so more than anything it was an experiment to see what the needs, enthusiasm, and challenges would be like for environmental projects in Bariloche,” said Dunfee. “The results were extremely encouraging and now that we know what we’re doing, I’m excited to expand the scope and scale of the projects, both in Argentina and at SASS Global Travel’s other locations. We’ll be working with organizations like Waves for Development, a surf ‘voluntourism’ organization, to identify similar opportunities in tropical communities, as well as work with our existing partners to expand our environmental efforts in the snow community.”
Video of the greenhouse project - http://vimeo.com/15675359
Story by protectourwinters.org
2 comments:
I have to post a comment about this article in order to point out certain discrepancies in what is written in this account and what actually happened in Bariloche this past winter. Although many of these projects were completed, it was necessarily due to significant financial or moral support through the owners and operators of SASS. Although their intentions may seem well, consumer's much have caution when reading such media pieces that proclaim certain organizations are "green" when in all reality their contributions to helping solve environmental problems are minimal. This effect, know as "green washing" a company, is often used as a marketing tool rather than an actual initiative to solve problems. At the time of my leaving Bariloche, the bio diesel reactor was a crude, primitive version of what it was supposed to be that did not produce any bio diesel of a usable quality. This was not due to the lack of effort and ingenuity provided by the builders, but rather a lack of funds provided by SASS to complete such a project with the appropriate mechanical system that would produce usable bio diesel. To this end, i simply ask that consumers be wary of these "green" projects that are blown up by marketing oriented representatives of for profits businesses that are prone to blow their horn without revealing shortcomings of said projects. Although these projects have good intentions, it is important for consumers to hold the companies accountable for their "green"policies and to make sure they are founded in reality. Also, SASS could and should promote cross cultural exchange besides taking campers to clubs and bars. Such expedition companies should feel responsible for showing their clients the real conditions that the local peoples of the areas being visited have to face on a day to day basis. If one leaves the resort in Bariloche and drives 15 minutes in the opposite direction of SASS head quarters, locals can be seen living in dire poverty and suffering from a lack of basic services. Social and environmental issues must be solved hand in hand, and these emerging transnational snowboard companies have to understand that these issues must be solved simultaneously. SASS did not address all of these issues, but they still deserve credit for opening the conversation about environmental problems facing different cultures. Lets hope that SASS can learn and mature from their first season implementing environmental projects and provide a seriously improved package of projects for the future.
thank you for your informative comment. I did not attend a SASS camp and was made aware of their efforts through three news sources. i promise to perform more investigative research before posting on such topics.
thanks,
snowboard green
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