Ever wondered exactly how solar panels work, or what it’s like to collect your own rain water, or how to live ‘off the grid’?
A tour of some of Cayman’s energy-efficient and sustainable homes next weekend will give visitors an insight into how homes using these ‘green’ approaches operate.
Mindy Pistacchio, organiser of the local group Green Drinks, will lead anyone interested in learning about these things to three environmentally-friendly homes on Saturday, 28 January.
“We’ll be visiting two solar homes, but they’re different as one sells its power back to CUC and the other one is off the grid,” Ms Pistacchio said.
“They also have other sustainable features, like rain water systems and composting,” she said. “Everything, including the way the building faces, was designed to maximise efficiency.”
Owners of the third home grow much of their own food, have a solar oven, a rain catchment system and do their composting.
The tour is the latest initiative by Cayman’s Green Drinks, a local branch of an international group that encourages people interested in the environment to get together, discuss ideas and share their knowledge and insights into everything from endangered species to solar energy.
The group meets the first Wednesday of every month at 6.30pm at a local bar – hence, the “Drinks” part of “Green Drinks”. The next two meetings will be held in Macabuca in West Bay. Look for the table with green tablecloths.
Green Drinks is an informal networking event where environmentally minded people meet over drinks and all are welcome – business owners, educators, students, government officials, fisherman and anyone else.
“Green Drinks is an international organisation that started about 15 years ago in London,” Ms Pistacchio said. “People have been starting up their own chapters all around the world, from the smallest islands, like Cayman, to cities like Sydney and New York.”
The Green Drinks movement began in the same low-key fashion in which it has continued – in a pub. In 1989, in the Slug and Lettuce pub in north London, Edwin Datschefski was sitting with his green design colleagues Yorick Benjamin and Paul Scott when he noticed an enviromental-minded acquaintance at a nearby table. That friend was sitting with his own eco-conscious mates, so they pulled their tables together. And that’s how Green Drinks was born.
There is no agenda at Green Drinks meetings, simply like-minded people who get together, though there may be themes to the meetings. The last one, for example, was about lionfish, Ms Pistacchio said.
She said the local meetings give people in Cayman’s “fragmented” environmental scene to get together and share ideas.
The group will depart for the tour of the green homes in Prospect, Bodden Town and West Bay from Kirk’s supermarket car park in George Town at 9am, Saturday, 28 January (near the Esso gas station) where they will meet to car pool.
Anyone interested in taking part in the green homes tour can get in contact with Ms Pistacchio on the Green Drinks Cayman page on Facebook.
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