The Veggie Bus

EMORY, Va. – Students here have found a new way to harness the power of vegetables: fuel for spring break.
Participants in the outdoor program at Emory & Henry College plan to drive more than 1,500 miles to Big Bend National Park on waste vegetable oil.
“It’s not like kind of a crazy, outlandish idea,” said Ryan Hasty, a senior chemistry and environmental studies major. “It’s very realistic.”
Last semester, the program spent $5,000 to buy an old bus from the Knoxville, Tenn., school system, said Jim Harrison, its director and an English professor at the college. With about $4,000 worth of work, they have it running – on vegetable oil discarded by the college cafeteria.
The main modifications are heaters to get the oil hot enough to behave like diesel and an on-board filtering system so they can refuel on the go.
The fuel sources they hope to find along the way? Fast-food restaurants. In a pinch, the bus can run on regular diesel fuel, but the students are confident they will be able to find vegetable oil to refuel.
“We kind of saw the contradiction between driving burning fossil fuels to go to a place to go hiking or kayaking or something like that, enjoying the environment and at the same time kind of … destroying it,” Hasty said. “With vegetable oil, you’re not adding any more [carbon to the atmosphere] than was already there before those plants were grown.”
Reduced pollution is one benefit of the veggie bus; reduced cost is another.
“With these kind of sports, really your only cost is getting to where you want to go,” said Brandon Dale, assistant director of the college outdoor program, for whom activities like kayaking and rock climbing are the norm. “If you cut that cost, you have almost no cost.”
The project – officially known as the Incredible Veggie Adventure Bus – is also linked to the college’s carbon-neutral initiative, a commitment signed by E&H President Rosalind Reichard to reduce its carbon footprint – the net amount of carbon pollution generated.
“I’m proud to be part of a program that’s not just talking about it, we’re actually getting our hands dirty and doing it,” said Michael Bianchi, 20, a senior from Harlan, Ky., of the veggie-powered effort to help address energy issues.
The students plan to test the bus’s long-range capability with a trip to Washington, D.C., for an environmental conference this weekend. The conference, called Power Shift, is being held to encourage the nation’s elected leaders to promote renewable energy – “essentially a green march on Washington,” Harrison said.
The students say there’s no one big solution to climate change, high energy prices and dependence on foreign oil; rather, there are a lot of small solutions. Vegetable oil vehicles are just one small part of the solution – but buses like this one are a step in the right direction.
“I think you have to ask yourself, ‘Why not?’ ” said Dale, who has also converted his personal vehicle to run on vegetable oil. “You have to think at some point it [the supply of petroleum] is going to dry up. So why not use what we have now to fuel the shift to green fuel so when it does dry up you’re prepared?”
Dale said entrepreneurs in other parts of the country have already set up homegrown fuel stations using waste vegetable oil in their communities – and it could happen here. Americans could have jobs producing fuel instead of sending their energy dollars to hostile foreign countries, he added.
“I just think it’s cool that such a small school can raise the money to do something like this, and hopefully other schools will look at it and see it as something they maybe could do,” said Casey Harden, 21, a junior from Fairfax, Va.
Hasty said at least one U.S. city runs its public transit buses on fuel produced with waste vegetable oil, a plan that could work in other places.
An underground network of veggie vehicle enthusiasts already exists, he said, even in the most unlikely places around Southwest Virginia – and it just takes a little bit of research to find them.
“People don’t really think about this when they go and fill up at the pump … but you’re talking about energy independence here,” Hasty said. “If you can get your fuel for free … that’s independence. That’s pretty valuable.”
Until recently, he said restaurants had to pay to get rid of their used vegetable oil; now, some companies actually buy the oil because they see an opportunity to make money on alternative fuels, whether it’s straight vegetable oil or biodiesel, which is produced using vegetable oil as an ingredient.
“Since we’ve gotten this bus converted, several students on campus and at least one other faculty member have actually converted their vehicles to vegetable oil, and they didn’t realize it was so easy,” Hasty said. “Global climate change is something that affects everyone, and everyone can do their part.”
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