U.S. Cities Want Your Waste Holiday Cooking Oil for Biodiesel Cars.
Last week, The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the success of a city-wide holiday recycling drive, which looked to top the more than two tons of used cooking oil San Fransicoans unloaded over Thanksgiving weekend. The grease will go to power the city’s fleet of fire trucks, ambulances, Muni buses and other vehicles.
According to Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, programs like this can also put a huge dent in the city’s sewer repair budget, as kitchen grease is one of the major causes of municipal water pipe damage, responsible for over 50% of sewer emergencies each year.
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San Francisco is hardly alone when it comes to WVO (Waste Vegetable Oil) recycling programs. A partnership with the U.S. EPA and the Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transportation District has fostered an aggressive recycling campaign that Santa Cruz officials have dubbed the “Fryer to Fuel” program.
Olof Hansen, U.S. EPA Region 9 representative, noted that local programs like “Fryer to Fuel” and San Francisco’s recycling system can have a huge impact on the overall success of the biofuel industry.
“By producing this fuel locally in commercial quantities, it will be substantially cheaper than imported virgin oil-based biodiesel and cost-competitive with petroleum diesel,” Hansen said. “This enables public diesel fleet managers to convert to this cleaner fuel without adverse impacts on operations.”
Image Credit: Azrainman’s Flickr Photostream under a Creative Commons License
