Changemakers: Embracing Hope, Taking Action, and Transforming the World by Weller Fay & Wilson Mary

Author:Weller,Fay & Wilson,Mary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2018-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

There’s a sense of excitement and discovery to free stores, to clothing swaps, and to upcycling. The discovery is never going to be just another boring t-shirt! Yet we may still find ourselves seeking the new rather than the used or up-cycled. To really weave these initiatives into the web of daily life, they need to become preferred options, ones that can both provide ways of keeping useful resources out of the waste stream and reduce our cost of living.

Fueled by waste vegetable oil

Using waste vegetable oil for fueling buses would seem to be a win-win story. Restaurants don’t have to pay someone to cart waste vegetable oil out of the community in large emission-producing trucks. The oil is used to produce a fuel that costs less than fossil fuels and doesn’t produce the greenhouse gas emissions that diesel or gas produce. Yet, trying to make it happen created waves on Gabriola Island.

Judith, Fay, and Bob wanted to convert the waste vegetable oil produced by island restaurants into biodiesel for the community bus. They applied for and received a grant to hire a summer student from the alternative energy program at the local college to research the process and assess the viability of creating biodiesel on Gabriola Island.

Working with Bob, Lisa (the student) produced a report that described the various do-it-yourself, as well as commercial, processors and corresponding processes. She visited a large biodiesel cooperative in a neighboring region and analyzed the amount of waste vegetable oil produced on Gabriola, to determine the most appropriate batch size. She talked to the various restaurants and pubs, and they loved the idea that their waste vegetable oil would be used for fueling the buses on the island, rather than being shipped outside the community.

However, the team bumped up against some opposition. When Lisa did a demonstration on the creation of biodiesel at the Fall Fair, a representative of the company that was currently picking up waste vegetable oil from the restaurants heckled her. Several community members spread a rumor that glycerin (a product of biodiesel production) attracts rats when composted and is harmful to the soil. The final criticism was that the biodiesel processing was dangerous and could blow up. These concerns were not usually communicated directly to the team working on the project; instead they were communicated by word of mouth, over the backyard fence, and the criticisms spread. The organizers decided not to proceed until the concerns had been addressed.

A couple of years later two of the organizers attended a biodiesel conference and heard how mixing diesel with the waste vegetable oil mix provides an alternative to making biodiesel from the waste vegetable oil. After further research and input from community members, the community bus group decided to combine filtered waste vegetable oil with diesel and use that mix for fueling the community bus. There were no protests from the community, and the company that had initially been against the community’s use of WVO from the restaurants had lost interest in protesting since all the restaurants were much happier keeping it on the island to fuel the bus.

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