For two years now we have been running our delivery truck on pure 100% recycled vegetable oil and last year we converted our Toyota Diesel powered irrigation pump to run on the same stuff.
The oil comes from two restaurants in San Francisco were we pick up oil every week while we are delivering our boxes and back haul it to the farm. on the farm we clean and filter the oil.
We have modified the engines rather than chemically modifying the fuel as in the case of biodiesel. The process we use involves heating and a final filtering of the oil. We start the engines on diesel to warm the and the fuel and then switch over to the vegetable oil. When we come to our destination we run the engine on diesel for about five minutes to flush out any vegetable oil in the fuel lines.
There is a tremendous amount of information on the web about how this all works so 'Google it'. We believe the emissions are about 50% of those of a regular diesel powered engine.
Biofuels are part of the solution in terms of our energy use but they are no panacea. We are giving a higher second use to a waste product and cutting down on the amount of fossil fuels we are using to produce our vegetables, fruit and herbs here at Eatwell Farm.