Salute and Tip o' the Hat

[Posting still thin while computer still broken.]

This began as a comment at Kate's place, about her abandonment of shampoo, paper towels and toilet paper, and got obnoxiously long. Its existence there was snipped and is reformatted below in its entirety.

One of the best things - some might argue the only useful thing - about this here interblog is the ability to share the little things in life with others of like mind. I need to take a moment to thank and salute katecontinued for sharing her sustainability journey - it's been so helpful and instructive at the beginning of my own. A few weeks ago when she linked this Life Less Plastic article (and a few others), I replaced my deodorant with baking soda and stopped using shampoo, and am very pleased with the results! I no longer have to use products to give my hair body and my showers are much faster now. My body does produce a lot of oil, so my hair's a little bit greasy, but my friends assure me not gross or stanky. And they're very amused at my experiments in being a Dirty Hippie™.

The baking soda bit has been a bit more up-and-down. I find I'm generally wetter (since I'm not wearing antiperspirant), but actually less smelly. When wearing deodorant at the end of the day I smell like a mixture of deodorant and sweat. When wearing baking soda at the end of the day I smell like nothing. There are a couple downsides, though: for one, on the rare occasions I sweat enough in a day to overcome my bicarbonate shield (such as the last few days that have been fairly hot and oppressively humid) there's no whiff of perfume to sweeten the rebellious odor. Also, when I was wearing deodorant it would rub off onto the underarms of my t-shirts, giving them their own little freshening perfumewhiff, without which I find I have to wash them slightly more often. Also helpful in this adventure is the fact that I've been shaving under me arms for several years now - sweat itself, you see, doesn't smell. It's the bacteria that live on the surface of your body and eat the nutrients in your sweat that produce stinky waste products. Removing the hair gives them significantly less surface area to live on, resulting in less B.O.

I'm not quite ready for the toilet paper adventure yet, though I salute those who've undertaken it, and paper towel is my single biggest struggle. I was raised using handkerchiefs but have been brainwashed through the years into always blowing my nose in something disposable. Add in how many I use for general household cleaning and you've got one guilty hippie. I want to try and cut down but my life's kind of on hold right now - I'm moving across the country in three weeks and trying to lighten my load rather than take on new projects. Though now that I think about it maybe some of my scrap fabrics from abandoned sewing projects can be used to make reusable washcloths/towels. Hmm...

But I digress. Continue to rock, Kate. And thank you.

Titrated Awesome

I keep hearing, "You can make your own biodiesel at home for $1 a gallon!" and finally decided to get off my arse and look into it (metaphorically; reading about it on the interwub I was actually still on my arse). I knew the basic gist of the esterification reaction: TRIGLYCERIDE (a.k.a. lipid, a.k.a. fat or oil) + 3ALCOHOL ----> 3ESTERS (biodiesel) + GLYCERINE. But reading this how-to got me all excited. The basic reaction is an esterification, but it also uses a strong base (NaOH, found in lye) to catalyze the lipid breakdown. And how do you figure out how much NaOH to use? You do a titration! If I end up teaching chemistry I can SO use this as a lab. A lab that teaches a practical skill! How awesome is that? As an added bonus, the recipe linked above calls for solid NaOH, which gives me the opportunity to teach students that some salts, such as NaOH, are deliquescent, meaning it has such a high affinity for water that it will suck the moisture out of the air to dissolve itself, and as a result you never know the exact concentration of your NaOH solution until you've done--guess what?--ANOTHER titration! [The recipe leaves that step out, but in a lab setting will I? NO!] Two titrations and an esterification in ONE lab!! Wooooo!

So the recipe basically goes:
1. Dissolve & titrate sodium hydroxide to create known NaOH solution
2. Titrate NaOH with lipid/isopropanol mixture to determine reactant ratios
3. CH₃OH (methanol) + NaOH ---> Na⁺CH₃O^- (sodium methoxide) + H₂O
4. LIPID + 3Na⁺CH₃O^- ---> 3METHYL ESTERS (biodiesel) + GLYCERINE
5. Let sit to separate
6. Profit. (If I can figure out how to purify the waste glycerine I can use it in the lab as a glassware/rubber tubing lube, saving the school money. If the district can be convinced to run buses on biodiesel the reaction can be run on a large scale using donated restaurant grease--everybody loves donating shit to schools, and currently most restaurants pay to have their grease hauled away.)

I am SO. GEEKED. right now.