Parked on a suburban street in South London, Andy Pag's Peugeot 405 looks like
any other car, although maybe a little shabbier. Bought for £500 on eBay, it
is 13 years old and was a taxi in a previous life, which explains the smell
of cigarettes and the 100,000 miles on the clock.
But next week it will lead a convoy across Europe. It's a banger race with a
difference, as the normally diesel-powered vehicles will have to run on used
cooking oil that drivers will be scavenging en route.
Few road trips are worthy of the title eco-friendly, but this one - in which
drivers rely on a waste product for their fuel - comes close.
The Grease to Greece rally, organised by 34-year-old Pag, who runs an online
wedding business when he's not on overland jaunts, sets off for Athens next
Saturday to highlight alternatives to fossil fuels. No one is sure how many
vehicles are going - somewhere between 10 and 20, Pag reckons - but it's
likely to be a colourful collection including a London taxi and a lorry
converted into a burger van to help to provide fuel along the way.
The rocketing cost of filling our tanks makes his case for experimenting with
different ways of running cars a strong one, but it is also a controversial
time to be flying the flag for biofuels, not all of which are made from
leftover cooking oil. Blamed for pushing up food prices and causing
deforestation in the developing world, biofuels have become unpopular in
recent months. I'm keen to find out Pag's view on this, as well as how easy
it is to adapt your car to run on chip shop waste.
He is an experienced eco-adventurer and this is not his first
awareness-raising road trip. Earlier this year, he returned from a
4,000-mile trip to Timbuktu in a lorry powered by fuel made from waste
chocolate. He prepared 2,000 litres of fuel to take with him from four
tonnes of factory rejects, using the oil in cocoa butter as the main
ingredient. The main problem he and John Grimshaw, his friend and co-driver,
faced on their low-carbon trip was hold-ups at borders while officials
investigated their unusual cargo.
This time he's taking Esther Obiri-Darko, his fiancée. Otherwise game for
adventure, the 36-year-old chemistry teacher looks dubious when Pag explains
the sleeping arrangements for their two-week trip. On the roof rack are all
the necessary components to erect a roof tent, quite literally a tent
pitched on the car roof. All I can make out are a couple of boards, but I'm
assured that these convert into a double bed, once they are unfolded,
secured and covered in canvas.
Since the point is not to get to Athens as fast as possible, but to do so
using the least possible fossil fuel, the couple may splash out on a few
hotels. “The winner is the best fat-finder,” Pag says. “Each vehicle is a
team and will get a fixed amount of our invented currency, the GreaseMark
(GM). It can be traded with other teams for oil and the winner will be the
team that collects the most GMs.” When they arrive in Athens, the British
Ambassador will present the winners with the Golden Lard Award.
Their biggest worry is that kebab shops and takeaway joints won't give them
any cooking oil, especially in countries with stringent regulations about
commercial waste.
But how will they go about converting dirty vegetable oil to something useful?
It's a complicated process. First, you have to filter the oil to get rid of
any floating bits of food. You then add alcohol and various chemical
catalysts to make biodiesel. This will be difficult on a road trip, so most
of the rally vehicles have been adapted so that they can run on straight
vegetable oil.
Peugeot will have an on-board centrifuge
To get around filtering, which would involve leaving the oil to drip through a
filter overnight and then warming it to get rid of any water, Pag's car has
been fitted with an Oilybits centrifuge, a device that spins the oil to get
rid of any gunk and water particles. He's taking along a couple of extras
for other cars to borrow.
For vehicles with unconverted engines, GreenFuels, a biodiesel equipment
supplier and the event's sponsors, will take a FuelPod2 to turn vegetable
oil into biodiesel, which most diesel cars can run on. The process takes
about eight hours, so can be done overnight.
It sounds tricky to me, and potentially a dangerous business. A
Northamptonshire man recently received 20 per cent burns when he blew up his
garage attempting to make biodiesel from the cooking oil he got from his
local Chinese takeaway.
But Pag insists that it's simpler than you might think. “There are lots of
shortcuts if you don't want to do the work yourself,” he says. “You could
find a biodiesel supplier who has already filtered and converted waste oil,
so then you could pour it straight into your tank.” This puts the price up a
fraction - biodiesel costs about £1 a litre.
The best bit about Pag's DIY method is that he buys old cooking oil from his
local greasy spoon for 10p a litre, so can fill his tank for a fiver. The
green credentials come not only from the fact that it's carbon neutral,
because you are simply releasing the CO2 that was absorbed when the plant
used to make the oil grew, but also because you are using a waste material
that would otherwise end up in landfill where it releases methane, a
damaging greenhouse gas. Or, worse still, goes down the drain into sewers
where it causes blockages and has to be fished out and sent to landfill.
“The rainforest being chopped down to turn into plantations to make fuel is
very different from what we're advocating,” Pag says. In many ways, it is
the green and ethically clean face of biodiesel.
“Some chip shops charge 30p a litre”
There is also a sense that you are beating the system. “When you get on the
internet forums, there's a feeling of counter culture about it, that you are
part of something and you are changing things for the better,” he says. But
we can't all run our cars off waste oil - there's not enough to go round. To
produce industrial quantities of biofuels, we would need vast areas of crops
dedicated to fuel production, an industry that has fallen out of favour with
most environmentalists but one that Pag is keen to defend. He argues that
there are many other reasons why food prices are going up, including the
rising price of oil and the developing economies of China and India.
“The industry needs to be given a chance,” he says. “We need better standards,
so when you fill up with a biodiesel blend at a pump, you know that the
product has been grown according to certain ethical standards . . . the only
way these structures will come into place is if the biofuels industry is
allowed to develop.”
Despite the brakes being put on the global biofuels market, the Government
recently endorsed DIY diesel. Last year, it relaxed the rules on fuel duty,
declaring that anyone could use up to 2,500 litres of biodiesel a year
without paying tax on it. This has increased demand, with reports earlier
this year of turf wars in London about who gets their hands on the oil.
As fuel prices rise, the restaurant industry's byproduct is becoming more
valuable, putting up prices for early converts such as Pag. “Chip shops used
to pay people to take away their waste oil,” he says. “These days some are
charging as much as 30p a litre. But it will always be cheaper and more
ethical than filling up with diesel at a forecourt garage.”
What about the rumour that chip fat wrecks a car's engine? There are various
things to check before you fill up at a kebab shop. For instance, not every
diesel engine is suitable and older models are generally better. Soy oil is
generally better too as it is less likely to freeze in cold weather. And
unlike Pag, who studied engineering at Brunel University and who has a
finely tuned understanding of cars, some of us are more mechanically
challenged.
Eco-agenda filters into his home life
His interest in green fuels grew out of a desire to keep travelling but in a
more sustainable way. “When Esther and I returned from a road trip from
London to Cape Town, three years ago, we felt bad about our carbon
footprint,” he says. “We felt it was quite indulgent doing these big trips,
but at the same time, we had the time of our lives.”
The eco-agenda may serve primarily to enable Pag and his fiancée to keep on
the move, but it filters into their home life as well. “We're fastidious
about composting and recycling,” he says. “We wouldn't call ourselves
environmentalists, we're simply conscious of doing our bit.”
They are now making ambitious plans to make fuel from plastic bags to power a
motorised paraglider. Another mad-hatter plan perhaps, but I don't doubt Pag
will manage it. I only hope he doesn't try to erect a roof tent.
FUELLING THE DEBATE
- What are biofuels? Fuel made from living things. This could be wood,
sugar cane or animal dung. The two most common are bioethanol, produced by
the fermentation of sugar in countries such as Brazil, and biodiesel, made
from processing plants such as oil-seed rape.
- Why are they green? Burning biofuels still releases CO2, but the
plants absorb a comparable amount while they are growing, so making the fuel
carbon neutral.
- So what's the problem? Biofuels have a heavier carbon footprint than
often assumed. The crops need fertilisers and pesticides which are made from
oil; processing also requires considerable energy. Recent concern centres on
the land used to grow biofuels - many feel that it would be better used for
growing food. There is concern too that biofuels will increase monoculture
farming. A Friends of the Earth campaign, “Biofuels: The Road To Nowhere”,
cites their potential to destroy forests and valuable habitats, as well as
their role in higher food prices and threatened food supplies.
- In their defence Not all biofuels are bad, we simply have to be
cautious about how we use them and the way that the industry expands. The
main challenge is to ensure that we are able to separate good production
methods from bad (destroying forests and habitats to plant crops is the
worst). We must account for their carbon footprint, from “farm to
forecourt”, and their sustainability, including the impact on people and
wildlife in the areas where they are grown.
