Family on clean fuel road trip
By TERENCE CHEAA California family drove to Argentina on recycled vegetable oil, writes TERENCE CHEA.
MALI Blotta and David Modersbach were unfazed by rising gas prices when they drove 17,700km during a family road trip from California to Argentina. Their 24-year-old station wagon runs on much cheaper fuel: recycled vegetable oil.
Hitting the road for five months, the couple and their four-year-old son toured 11 countries in a Volkswagen powered by waste grease they collected from restaurants and fried-food factories along the way.
“We’re promoting an alternative to the oil economy,” Modersbach said. “The trip wasn’t just about the voyage. It was about spreading information about vegetable-based fuel.”
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Mali Botta and David Modersbach in a friend's vegetable-oil powered vehicle in California last month. They and their four-year-old son had just returned from a five-month road trip in a station wagon that ran on spent vegetable oil from restaurants. |
Cities across the United States are adopting programmes to run municipal trucks and buses on biodiesel. Most cities use a hybrid fuel comprised of 20% biodiesel and 80% regular diesel. A few cities, like Berkeley, have switched to 100% biodiesel. All diesel vehicles can run on biodiesel sold commercially.
But biodiesel purists are looking for fuel among the refuse of fast-food restaurants, cafeterias, and potato chip factories. Waste grease is made up of the same raw material as commercial biodiesel, but diesel engines must be modified to run on veggie oil.
Environmentalists give biodiesel mixed reviews. While biodiesel produces fewer greenhouse gases than gasoline, it releases more smog-forming pollutants, said Diane Bailey, a diesel expert at the US Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
Bailey supports the use of 100% biodiesel for people who already drive diesel vehicles, but she doesn’t see vegetable oil as a long-term solution to cleaning the air, despite the couple’s successful road trip.
“My hat’s off to them, but I don’t think the average American can pull that off,” Bailey said. “There’s a limited amount of waste grease out there.”
Blotta, 40, and Modersbach, 38, believe used veggie oil shouldn’t go to waste. Last year, they paid US$400 (RM1,520) for a silver 1980 Volkswagen Dasher with a 482,700km history and converted its diesel engine to run on waste grease by adding a second fuel tank and a set of tubes and filters. They start the station wagon with regular diesel, then switch to vegetable oil once it’s heated and thinned out.
After setting off from Oakland in early November, the family didn’t have trouble finding fuel at restaurants in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, but it wasn’t so easy once they left the country.
“It was a constant struggle,” Modersbach said. “Everyday we had to ask people. We’d buy a bag of chips and go to the address on the bag. We’d go to dozens of restaurants, and they wouldn’t have any spare oil.”
Once they found the vegetable oil, they filtered the “french fries, chicken skins, chips, fish scales” and other food particles before filling up their tank and firing up the engine. “You don’t notice any difference until it smells like french fries or popcorn,” Modersbach said.
On their way to Rosario, Argentina, they passed through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia – all countries affected by the politics of petroleum, they said.
“Everywhere we noticed everyone was conscious of the connection between the petroleum business and contamination and the taking of lands from indigenous people and wars,” said Blotta, a native of Argentina.
As they stopped in towns and cities in search of fuel, they taught people how to run their diesel engines on biodiesel and vegetable-oil-based fuels.
The family returned to California in April but plans to return to Argentina to continue promoting biodiesel.
“This planet needs help,” Blotta said. “We need alternatives to the use of pollutants as fuel.” – AP
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