Green Guide Network's Casey Cochran recently returned from Argentina where he linked up with South America Snow Sessions (SASS) and their Sustainability Director, Ryan Dunfee. Ryan took a moment from his hectic schedule to shed some light on life, sustainability, and broken bones in South America.

Casey Cochran: So Ryan, first can you tell us how you ended up down here in Argentina working with SASS? 

Ryan Dunfee:  Completely by chance, or fate if you believe in that.  I was living in Aspen last year ski bumming after college with some friends and decided I wanted to push myself and do a winter in the French Alps before I started a career in sustainability.  I came back home last November to New Hampshire, expecting to go to France in a few weeks.  My job looked like it was falling through, and when I went to check out the surf one afternoon, my now-boss Travis Moore was coming out of the water.  He saw the ski stickers on my car and started talking to me about skiing, and eventually it came out that he co-owned South America Snow Sessions.  I'd applied to a job as a Spanish instructor last spring and had been looking at the company for a long time, so I couldn't believe these guys were in New Hampshire - they'd just opened their office a few miles from my house.  They were looking for sales guys and "interviewed" me, which consisted of Travis yelling at me for two hours about how he was going to change my life and do the sickest stuff ever, etc.  I am a fairly reserved and skeptical individual, but after spending one day in the office, I was hooked.

So after 7 months, I finally made it to Argentina to ski thanks to putting in some serious time working at SASS, albeit I had to show up with a broken ankle instead of being able to show up the rest of the sales team.

CC: SASS is an incredible organization full of amazing people, what's your background in sustainability?

Ryan:  I majored in Spanish in college, and my minor was in environmental studies.  I have always been interested in sustainability in the contest of a business, and have done a few different internships in different areas of sustainability, but this has been my first hands-on experience with sustainability work.

CC: What are SASS's plans for the sustainability initiatives on the compound?

Ryan:  I came up with a few different projects I thought would be managable and worthwhile for us to engage in.  They ended up being building a biodiesel reactor to process waste veggie oil into biodiesel, building a greenhouse for the local community, and creating a carbon offset program for our clients' flights that will be done in Argentina, and put together a full carbon footprint analysis of our company to see where we really need to work.

CC: Can you tell us a little about the greenhouse we're here to help build?

Ryan:  When I proposed the idea of doing some community and environmental projects, one of our Argentina ski coaches, Mauri Cambilla, thought we should build a greenhouse, as the access to fresh fruit and vegetables in very limited in Bariloche and especially so in the winter, where it mostly gets shipped in from Chile.  We're working to identify a school that we can donate the greenhouse to once it's built so that the kids can have an active part in growing their own produce and gain a better connection to their food.  We're also building the walls out of recycled plastic bottles, an ingenious construction method that our Director of Marketing, Luke Shelley, found out about.

CC: How have the materials such as the bamboo and bottles for the greenhouse been sourced?

Ryan:  The bamboo to support the walls of bottles we found right on our compound in Bariloche - this place is a crazy environment where there's snow, parrots, and bamboo all in the same place.  The bottles we've been collecting from restaurants, clubs and hotels at the mountain and around town.  Mostly that's been willingly donated, but occasionally we have to dig through the trash looking for bottles.  The municipality does not have any recycling program or seperation of waste, so getting people to get stoked on recycling has been an interesting process

CC: You also mentioned a bio-diesel generator, what's the plan for that and what impact on SASS and the community do you see?

Ryan:  We built a home-made biodiesel processor with the help of professional skier Mark Abma, who has his own winter sports sustainability foundation called 1 Step, Martin Wainstein from the Argentine sustainability consulting firm Wulcon Energy, and our sustainability intern Chris Burley.  We still have to do a lot of testing on the system and we've had to deal with all kinds of issues from dirty oil to inaccurate measurements to crappy lye and lack of methanol - putting this project together in this corner of Argentina has been interesting, although we've also been collaborating with a few other people in Bariloche we've learned have their own biodiesel processor.

Once we have the processor dialed, we're planning on donating the system to the local recycling association, la Asociacion de Recicladores de Bariloche.  They are a completely self-funded organization of impoverished individuals who started by organizing all the people who were climbing all over the city dump looking for recyclables to sell, and have a very bare-bones operation.  We're hoping that this will reduce their fuel costs while enabling them to recycle yet another material in Bariloche.  We're working with the Protect Our Winters, who just opened a Bariloche office, to get them some badly needed safety and sanitary equipment as well as a new truck - right now they can only drive next door to the dump, and the truck isn't strong enough to make it to town or to the mountain to pick up recyclables, even though people are willing to recycle.   I think this idea really connects the dots in a lot of ways and makes complete sense - help them pracically by reducing their costs, enable them to recycle more material, and if we can get them a new truck, get them out and about recycling more materials in an environmentally-friendly way.  So I've been furiously poring over the internet and books to master this biodiesel processor so it's dialed before we go.

CC: Bariloche is surrounded by world-class, beautiful terrain and I know my personal awareness of the environment has been heightened - how has the response from your clients been to the programs?

Ryan:  There are definitely clients who could care less, but on the whole the response has been really good.  We had a bunch of our coaches and us pounding away building the greenhouse in the backyard, or building the biodiesel processor in the hotel, and everyone wanted to know what we were doing, and many were super stoked to help.  We've had some success getting clients to offset the carbon footprint of their flights, but I feel that people have been really stoked on all the programs we're pursuing and are impressed that a ski program like ours is really taking some serious and innovative steps.

CC: Being a progressive organization, what does SASS intend to do to keep pushing towards a greener experience here?

Ryan:  SASS and SASS Global Travel are travel businesses, which are inherently carbon-intensive; I mean even if we make the experience in Argentina and in our other trips completely carbon-neutral, 85% of the carbon footprint of the lifecycle of our product comes from the flights it takes to get clients halfway around the world.  For that reason, we've really spent some time trying to develop a legitimate carbon offset program, as I have no idea how to make a 747 run off of solar power.  With help from Martin from Wulcon, we've developed a program where SASS will fund independent solar projects in the rural northwest desert region of Argentina, whose population is mostly indigenous with almost no access to electricity.  They burn limited desert shrubs to do almost anything, such as heating their school or cooking food, and this increases the desertification of the area as the shrubs are very slow to grow back.  We were able to calculate the impact of replacing the burning of shrubs with a solar oven, solar kitchen, or solar school, and quantify it for our clients - it costs about $65 to offset the 4.8 tons of air travel most people take to come to SASS.  But beyond that, it provides an even bigger social benefit for these people, who instead of spending time scouring the land for kindling can now spend more time learning or performing other useful tasks.

As we develop our SASS Global Travel business model, which will consist of the best action sports and adventure travel experiences in the world, we're trying to figure out how sustainability will be a true asset to the success of the company and a core part of our business structure.  Now it's an auxiliary part of our business, but it will definitely take time to figure out how to make sustainability a core tenet of a travel company.  But we'll start where we can; our Puerto Rico surf trip is impressively sustainable, as you live in treehouses built from bamboo grown on the property that have solar hot water and solar electricity.  If we can figure out how to run the ground transportation on waste veggie oil, increase the energy efficiency of our lodging, and do these other practical measures, I think we'll begin to understand how sustainability can really become a part of everything we do.  We're also hoping to run our SGT promotional tour with our education partner Sierra Nevada College this fall on veggie oil, and are partnering with Waves For Development to develop legitimate voluntourism opporunities on many of our trips.

CC: Ok, what's up with the broken ankle?

Ryan:  I started skiing October 8th in Colorado this year, so by the time May came around and I was still skiing and was going to spend July, August, and September skiing in Argentina, I figured I'd try to ski every month of the year, which was sort of my consolation prize after suffering through a New England winter after epic Colorado conditions.  I climbed up to Tuckerman's Ravine in June with my friend Rob, which is off of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire and is the only place that holds snow on the east coast into the summer.  It was a terrible day, raining the whole time, but we went for it anyway.  I skied one terrible run down a little landing strip of snow and then we started hiking down, and my ankle started throbbing; I must have stress fractured it somehow.  Took me four hours of cursing and pain to get down the hill, at which point we drove to my friend's condo to relax and ice my ankle.  As I was hobbling up the stairs, I put half of my foot on the stair and the pressure was enough to seperate my talus bone.  It was pretty painful and I was praying it was just a sprain but after I saw the x ray, that was it - no skiing in Argentina, where I'd been trying to go to ski for four years.  Oh well, at least I get to pour through trash bags in the rain on my crutches looking for plastic bottles while everyone else skis pow.

CC: Hey thanks for everything Ryan. Looks like SASS is really doing an incredible job and we hope to see the developments come to life in the near future. The mountains are calling and the snow down here is incredible so I'm out of here - good luck with the ankle!

Ryan: Thanks man - can't wait for my ankle to heal so I can surf when I get home.

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