5 ms·

Another stupid part of this: used cooking grease has positive market value! Quite a few companies, even in expensive places like Palo Alto, will happily supply

by amluto 8mo ago

Another stupid part of this: used cooking grease has positive market value! Quite a few companies, even in expensive places like Palo Alto, will happily supply you, for free, with barrels and such to hold your grease, and they'll come empty them when they're full, and I think you can even often negotiate to get paid to give these companies your grease. It gets recycled into various non-tasty but still useful commodities. (The economics work out at restaurant scale but not necessarily at household scale. If you deep fry a lot at home, you might be responsible for transporting your own grease to someone who wants it.)

fwipsy 8mo ago
Was this also the case back in 1994?
- tekla 8mo ago
  https://www.thesylvaherald.com/history/article_c59f8f3e-dfb6-11e9-8ab9-3bdcad002238.html https://www.thesylvaherald.com/history/article_c59f8f3e-dfb6...
jandrese 8mo ago
In the old days people would convert diesel trucks and cars to run on "biodiesel" which was lightly processed used cooking oil. You could tell who did that because their cars always smelled like french fries.
- ralferoo 8mo ago
  In the UK, all the used oil from MacDonalds is converted into biodiesel. I often walk past the plan where they do this and there's usually a lorry waiting to be allowed in through the gates. A few years back there was some eco-warrior protest outside trying to stop the lorries going in. Not really sure what they were trying to achieve with that as it seemed counter to their aims.
  - ajb 8mo ago
    Occasionally people in the UK get caught putting cooking oil in their (diesel ) cars, which is not illegal per se - but technically if you do it, you should pay fuel tax, which they generally don't. McDonald's are large enough that they will be, knowing that they would inevitably be caught.
  - rmunn 8mo ago
    Many eco-warrior types, not every single one but many, have... how to put this gently... not thought things all the way through. To name just one example I can think of: protesting an oil pipeline being constructed and/or extended. Well, what will happen if the pipeline doesn't go in? People will still want gasoline — protesting the pipeline isn't going to do anything about people's desire to drive their cars around — so that oil is going to get transported to the refinery somehow. If not in a pipeline, then it'll get transported by train or truck. Which will 1) burn a lot more fuel than transporting the same amount of oil through a pipeline, and 2) be more prone to accidents and oil spills (a tiny chance per truck, but that adds up fast when there are thousands of trucks per month), therefore very likely to spill more oil than the pipeline would have. In other words, blocking that pipeline is very likely to cause more ecological damage than having it built would have caused. The eco-warrior types protesting the pipeline probably think that they're reducing the use of oil. But they haven't thought it all the way through.
    - adzm 8mo ago
      Are you sure this isn't a strawman? The recent Dakota pipeline protests for example were very clearly about water safety and building through native burial grounds and other historic native sites. Pretty much every pipeline protest I can think of is more concerned with environmental danger of spills, not reducing oil. And a catastrophic pipeline spill can be much worse than isolated truck spills, though I'd love to know more about research on that front.
      - gruez 8mo ago
        So standard NIMBY? "I think oil pipelines are great, just not in my backyard!"
- GJim 8mo ago
  > "biodiesel" which was lightly processed used cooking oil No. Biodiesel is fuel made directly from vegetable matter; typically it needs a ""special"" engine to run, or is blended in a low ratio with ordinary diesel (B7 in the UK and EU). Processed cooking oil is made into HVO. This can be used as a direct 1:1 replacement for ordinary diesel without engine modifications. Very green! Unsurprisingly, HVO has a higher price than biodiesel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrotreated_vegetable_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrotreated_vegetable_oil HVO is easily available in the UK and is typically bought by bus companies and delivery companies seeking to improve their green footprint. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=HVO+supliers+UK&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=HVO+supliers+UK&ia=web
  - adiabatichottub 8mo ago
    In the early 2000s I traveled thousands of miles in an old school bus fueled by waste vegetable oil (WVO). The system was very simple, the bus had an extra fuel tank with a heat exchanger to the engine coolant, a couple fuel filters, and some hand-operated valves in the engine compartment. You start on diesel, warm up and switch to WVO. Before shutting down you would switch back to diesel to purge the system. You also pack a box of extra filters because they'd need frequent replacement. It was a somewhat popular conversation in some circles. Old Mercedes Benz diesel sedans were a common choice.
ThrownOffGame 8mo ago
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by amluto 8mo ago

fwipsy 8mo ago

Was this also the case back in 1994?

tekla 8mo ago
https://www.thesylvaherald.com/history/article_c59f8f3e-dfb6-11e9-8ab9-3bdcad002238.html https://www.thesylvaherald.com/history/article_c59f8f3e-dfb6...

jandrese 8mo ago

In the old days people would convert diesel trucks and cars to run on "biodiesel" which was lightly processed used cooking oil. You could tell who did that because their cars always smelled like french fries.

ralferoo 8mo ago
In the UK, all the used oil from MacDonalds is converted into biodiesel. I often walk past the plan where they do this and there's usually a lorry waiting to be allowed in through the gates. A few years back there was some eco-warrior protest outside trying to stop the lorries going in. Not really sure what they were trying to achieve with that as it seemed counter to their aims.
- ajb 8mo ago
  Occasionally people in the UK get caught putting cooking oil in their (diesel ) cars, which is not illegal per se - but technically if you do it, you should pay fuel tax, which they generally don't. McDonald's are large enough that they will be, knowing that they would inevitably be caught.
- rmunn 8mo ago
  Many eco-warrior types, not every single one but many, have... how to put this gently... not thought things all the way through. To name just one example I can think of: protesting an oil pipeline being constructed and/or extended. Well, what will happen if the pipeline doesn't go in? People will still want gasoline — protesting the pipeline isn't going to do anything about people's desire to drive their cars around — so that oil is going to get transported to the refinery somehow. If not in a pipeline, then it'll get transported by train or truck. Which will 1) burn a lot more fuel than transporting the same amount of oil through a pipeline, and 2) be more prone to accidents and oil spills (a tiny chance per truck, but that adds up fast when there are thousands of trucks per month), therefore very likely to spill more oil than the pipeline would have. In other words, blocking that pipeline is very likely to cause more ecological damage than having it built would have caused. The eco-warrior types protesting the pipeline probably think that they're reducing the use of oil. But they haven't thought it all the way through.
  - adzm 8mo ago
    Are you sure this isn't a strawman? The recent Dakota pipeline protests for example were very clearly about water safety and building through native burial grounds and other historic native sites. Pretty much every pipeline protest I can think of is more concerned with environmental danger of spills, not reducing oil. And a catastrophic pipeline spill can be much worse than isolated truck spills, though I'd love to know more about research on that front.
    - gruez 8mo ago
      So standard NIMBY? "I think oil pipelines are great, just not in my backyard!"
GJim 8mo ago
> "biodiesel" which was lightly processed used cooking oil No. Biodiesel is fuel made directly from vegetable matter; typically it needs a ""special"" engine to run, or is blended in a low ratio with ordinary diesel (B7 in the UK and EU). Processed cooking oil is made into HVO. This can be used as a direct 1:1 replacement for ordinary diesel without engine modifications. Very green! Unsurprisingly, HVO has a higher price than biodiesel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrotreated_vegetable_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrotreated_vegetable_oil HVO is easily available in the UK and is typically bought by bus companies and delivery companies seeking to improve their green footprint. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=HVO+supliers+UK&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=HVO+supliers+UK&ia=web
- adiabatichottub 8mo ago
  In the early 2000s I traveled thousands of miles in an old school bus fueled by waste vegetable oil (WVO). The system was very simple, the bus had an extra fuel tank with a heat exchanger to the engine coolant, a couple fuel filters, and some hand-operated valves in the engine compartment. You start on diesel, warm up and switch to WVO. Before shutting down you would switch back to diesel to purge the system. You also pack a box of extra filters because they'd need frequent replacement. It was a somewhat popular conversation in some circles. Old Mercedes Benz diesel sedans were a common choice.

ThrownOffGame 8mo ago

[dead]