Reducing a carbon footprint one pedal at a time

Reducing the carbon footprint, one pedal at a time

By Deborah Wheeler

debbie_wheeler@link.freedom.com

One Santa Rosa Beach woman has found the answer to high gas prices at the pump. The answer comes in the form of a bike.

While many visitors to the beach bike for exercise and enjoyment, Celeste Cobena has made it a way of life as far as travel goes.

Cobena owns a home-based business - the Soap Pedaler - and must make regular deliveries of her specialty soap and bath products up and down County Road 30A. She also ships the soaps to customers throughout the southeast. Her trips to the UPS store at Grand Boulevard and all points on 30A, she makes on her trusty Surly Big Dummy bike from her home in Dune Allen Beach.

Cobena said she has always been a biker and an environmentalist and began delivering her homemade soaps via bike 10 years ago at the business's inception. She pulled a cart laden with her goods along behind her bike.

"I got really busy, though, and got away from using the bike since I had to go so many places," she said.

But when gas prices hit $3 a gallon last year, Cobena vowed not to pay it and bought the new Surly.

She makes the trips on an "as needed basis" to the stores carrying her more than 30 varieties of soap, scrubs, lotions and balms, concocted in her sweet aroma-filled "soap studio" in the back of her home.

The shops include Patchouli's at Gulf Place and Rosemary Beach, Toni's Market at Grayton Beach, Picket's in Seagrove, and For the Health of It in Blue Mountain.

"It took me an hour and a half to ride my bike as far as Alys Beach. During Spring Break, it took me an hour and 20 minutes to drive it," she said incredulously. "Why not bike it?"

"People say they couldn't do it, but they could," she continued. "I started out just going a short ways and kept going a little farther and a little farther. I make it into an enjoyable trip and stop by Seaside for ice cream or lunch. It's a fun."

Cobena also bikes to shop for groceries at Grand Boulevard, toting them home in the bike's side carriers.

"I don't love riding on the side of 98, but I'll do it," she said. "It's an easy ride along 30A. You can do a lot without a combustion engine."

On Sundays, Cobena shares her wheels with her hubby, Ted, who plays in a band at Stinky's Fish Camp. He loads his congas into the bike's side carriers and pedals the short distance to Stinky's.

Even though Cobena's business has grown from its austere beginnings at her kitchen sink and she is at the level where she could hire help, she wants to keep it at the level it is now - a home-based cottage industry.

"I want to keep it at a level where I can ride my bike to make deliveries. It's about quality of life, reducing my carbon footprint and how good it is, not how big," she said.