Sandra Caire and her family love nature and care about environment. She is working as Process Development Engineer at Sekisui Specialty Chemicals in Tarragona, Spain, and takes care of sustainable projects in her free time. It is more than deserved that Sandra receives an award as one of SEKISUI’s “Greenest Persons 2017”.
Since 2012, the SEKISUI “Greenest Person Award” is given to employees to honor outstanding environmental engagement and volunteering activities. In 2017, more than 10,400 SEKISUI employees voted for their favorite project. The first prize goes to Adrián de J. Saldaña García from SEKISUI S-Lec Mexico, who collected 2,450 votes for his project. He created a commission to save the Apatlaco River in Mexico.
One of the first prizes also goes to Europe! Congratulations to Sandra Caire from Sekisui Specialty Chemicals, who is awarded with the third place of the “Greenest Person Award”. With her green homemade solar oven Sandra convinced colleagues from all over the world.
We pass the word to Sandra to tell us more about her prize-winning activity:
“The solar oven idea was born a few years ago. My husband and I have been interested in alternative energy sources since we built our house in 2010. At that time, it was still quite difficult or very expensive to integrate those concepts in the design of housing in Spain. We wanted to do much more to make our home ‘greener’ but at least we installed an aerothermal water heating system.
When our daughter Lola was born, our ‘green mind’ was asked once again. Anyone having a baby may know the partly negative impact on environment – hundreds or thousands of used diapers, higher water use, etc.. We decided to look for a solution to compensate (in a very humble way) our impact on earth. As we live in Southern Europe, taking advantage of the sun was a must. The sun has a huge potential in energy generation and carbon dioxide emission reduction.
A solar oven at home is a simple way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The idea was set in our mind, so we started drawing general sketches that slowly evolved to more detailed ones. Searching on the internet also helped us developing the idea. The concept was clear: If it should to be ‘green’, it has to be ‘green’ from the beginning to the end.
Once we knew the materials we needed, we started looking for them at home as well as our surroundings. We found aluminum metal plates to use as reflectors, we stored our everyday meal aluminum trays to use them as reflectors as well, we looked into our garage for wood timber (planks) from an old bookshelf and a wine bottle box, etc.. Finally, around 99% of the materials were re-used, reducing even more of the CO2 emission.
After some months working on the basic prototypes the solar oven was born!
This is the literally ‘green’ homemade solar oven.
This is the literally ‘green’ homemade solar oven.
Indirectly, there is a connection to my job at SEKISUI. As we work in the industrial area of Tarragona in Spain, we can see the impact of human activities on the environment every day. Every effort – as small as it may be – is important to reduce our impact on fragile nature. SEKISUI gave me the consciousness for that.”
