Busy like Beez

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Categories: Burt's Bees, Events & Destinations: Piedmont

Jun 20, 2008 09:06 am 4 Comments

June 20^th, 2008

Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

9AM and I find myself in a hip coffee shop in downtown Chapel Hill, surrounded by busy people and the scintillating smell of ground coffee beans. As the Bus wireless card still stubbornly refuses to work, we are all feeling a bit starved for internet and have taken to invading, en mass, any public space that offers free Wifi.

Having spent very little time in the South before, I must say, everyone we’ve met so far has more than lived up to the famous spirit of southern hospitality. A big thank you to all of you who made our stay in North Carolina so fabulous! Well-fed bussers are happy bussers!

Now I’m sure you are wondering what else we’ve been up to these past 24 hours (besides stuffing ourselves silly with fried chicken and mashed potatoes). Yesterday morning the Bus took a little trip to Piedmont Biofuels, a roughly 600 member strong coop that produces and sells their own biodiesel.

I’ll be the first to admit, up till yesterday, I still wasn’t quite sure what exactly biodiesel was, let alone how it’s made. But no longer!

Here is the short and skinny version. To make biodiesel, you need three elements: any grease or lipid, a catalyst, and alcohol. At Piedmont, they use waste vegetable oil or chicken fat, and Potassium Hydroxide and Methanol for the last two ingredients. The grease used in biodiesel production is a triglyceride (meaning there are three acids attached to a glycerin). To make biodiesel you must break the bonds between the acids and the glycerin molecule. That’s what the Potassium Hydroxide does. Once the fatty acids are separated from the glycerin, they can bond to the Methanol and form biodiesel. Voila! Though the process sounds relatively simple on paper, it takes lots of work and experience to produce good biodiesel. For more information, check out Piedmont Biofuels on line at < http://biofuels.coop/>.

After an illuminating tour of Piedmont’s operations, we then headed to our sponsor Burt’s Bees corporate headquarters near Durham, NC (www.burtsbees.com). There we took a tour of the manufacturing facility, where we oohed and ahhed at the rows and rows of lip balm (Hi Gabby) and all sorts of goodies shooting down those conveyor belts. The Bus then had lunch with CEO John Replogle (Dartmouth Class of ’88! Woo!) and Director of Sustainability, Yola Carlough. I’m sure every busser will agree wholeheartedly when I say that John and Yola represent such an inspiration for us all. Burt’s Bees is leading the way in corporate responsibility, and we, the consumers in America, can help by ensuring companies are doing their best to incorporate sustainability into their day-to-day operations. Be it by reducing carbon emissions, switching packaging, or as simple as trying to decrease office paper use.