American Festivals Project

If I knew Chinese my life would be a lot easier.  Why, you might ask?

Well, in the very messy, taxing, and time-consuming world of driving a waste vegetable oil (WVO) powered vehicle, one soon learns that the best place for finding clean oil is at Chinese restaurants.  Knowing Chinese would greatly increase my chances of convincing restaurant managers that it is O.K. and a very good idea to give me free oil.  Persuasiveness goes a long way when acquiring WVO, and a language barrier does not help.

Our Dodge Ram 2500 is converted with two 40-gallon tanks and we’ve upgraded our potential oil storage by purchasing four 5-gallon buckets.  So we have the ability to store 100 gallons of sweet, beautiful, free WVO in our truck.

The difficulty with acquiring WVO is not finding it.  Finding it is the easy part.  If you care to notice in the next few days while driving around your town, almost every restaurant or diner has a black container behind their building or in the parking lot.  It looks like a small dumpster.  We’ve found that they are almost unanymously designed.  I’ve learned to spot them from a mile away, even when we don’t even need veggie oil.  It’s a sad habit that I’ve naturally fallen into.  However, if you view each of those containers like $500, you’ll understand my reasoning.

The hard part of acquiring WVO is finding restuarants who are willing to give it to you.  The “magic” WVO system has not proven to be as magical as commonly talked about.  Five years ago, maybe–but now there are companies who pay the restaurants for their WVO.  I was talking to the owner of a diner in Pennsylvania, and he told me how the WVO market fluctuates over the years.  In the 80’s restaurants were getting paid for their oil.  In the 90’s the market turned, and they found themselves having to pay to get rid of it.  The owner I was talking to said it was just recently that a company supplied him with a container and they started paying him a few dollars a month.  But because he was barely making any money, he had agreed to give us some.  He was a really nice man.

In the areas of the country with greater wealth or more environmental awareness, those contracts are a given.  This has been true of almost all big cities, and all of the New England that we visited.

Typically, we ask around at ten to twenty restuarants, some who might have beautiful, huge vats of oil, but we receive the same answers: “We’d love to give it to you, but we have a contract.”  Arrggh, damn the collection companies!!  Sometimes it’s so hard not to want to return at night and just steal it.  The restaurant wouldn’t care, the collection company would never know…we could all be friends.

But slowly, we’ve been learning how to find WVO despite these contracts.  Most of the time we score big it’s just luck, or divine intervention!  We’ve learned that the restuarants in small towns are less likely to have contracts, especially the mom-and-pop restuarants/diners, where even if they did have a contract, they are willing to give it to us due to our situation and friendly smiles (and polite begging).  So, when on the search for oil, instead of taking the interstate, we stick to state highways.

And the Chinese restaurants?  I would estimate that 90% of our collected WVO has come from Chinese restaurants.  Actually, sometimes it helps that the workers don’t speak English.  I make lots of hand gestures that look like me driving, and outlining the shape of a box, and then something to the effect of pumping oil like one of those old-fashioned water pumps.  By that point they probably think I’m crazy, and just smile and say, “Yes, ok!”  But truthfully, when we do score big with the Chinese restaurants, it’s usually because they don’t know anything about a contract, or the owner is not present, so they just give the o.k.  It’s always a little scary when that happens, because as we are pumping the WVO, I always imagine the owner coming rearing around the back of the restuarant, flaming mad and accusing us of stealing.  That’s why we have the shotgun though!

So, the question that I sometimes ask myself, and you might be asking us right now is, “Is it worth it?”  Well, in terms of saving money, there is no question.  Yes.  Incredibly so.  I estimate that in another month, the conversion kit will have paid for itself.  The process has been messy, frustrating, and incredibly time consuming–but I’m willing to put up with all that if it’s saving dollar$.  And the more experience we get, the easier everything becomes.  Besides, we’re helping to save the planet, right?

While we wait for the WVO market to change, which will probably be another twenty years, I’ll work on my Chinese.