Photo by Pylbug. Licensed under Creative Commons license 2.0.

Teach a man to eat fish & chips and he'll enjoy his lunch. Teach a man to turn fish & chip oil into biodiesel, and he'll drive a cleaner car. As the Onion once said, stereotypes are a real time saver. So, I don't have to tell you how much those Brits love their fish & chips, right? Now, though, the food that's eaten by every single British person at least two times a day is also contributing to the green fuel movement in the UK. According to the AFP, a group called the Low Impact Living Initiative (LILI) is out teaching classes on how to turn waste grease into biodiesel. Their favorite source of used oil is fish and chip shops, which, by law in the UK, must be placed every 50 feet all along the country so that a Briton never need stop eating the battered fish or deep fried potatoes. Thus far, LILI has taught over 1,000 people how to process the oil into biodiesel, and told the paper that each rise in fuel prices brings in more people, each one of them carrying three serving of fish and chips.

You know, reading this post over again, I think I may have exaggerated a bit here and there.

[Source: AFP]

Photo by Paul Keleher. Licensed under Creative Commons license 2.0.

Yesterday, driving around the Detroit suburbs, I saw a man holding up a sign along the side of the road that read, "We buy gold inside Kroger." (Kroger is a large grocery store chain). It seemed to me that the man making (I'm guessing) minimum wage to hold a piece of cardboard alerting people that they can hawk their jewelery at the local grocery store for quick cash is one of those sure signs that the economy is failing (necklace for noodles, anyone?). Another sure sign in my eyes are the increased incidents of people stealing waste grease from restaurants.

This isn't new, and folks have been stealing standard fuel, too. But the New York Times reports that grease bandits are more active now than ever before, trying to steal waste grease to supply biofuel providers and move our vehicles. Part of the reason is that this stuff is a commodity, trading at around 33 cents a pound this week, up from under eight cents in 2000, thanks to biodiesel producer demand. To help prevent thieves from taking gas straight out of the tank, vehicle drivers can buy a locking gas cap. What are restaurants supposed to do? Buy huge locking dumpsters? Kind of. Some restaurant owners are considering putting surveillance cameras out back to keep an eye on the liquid waste.

[Source: New York Times]

If you are reading our site, you are probably already familiar with the fact that any diesel vehicle can run on biodiesel. As a matter of fact, most any can diesel vehicle can even run on used vegetable oil with just a few modifications. There are some issues with vegetable oil which must first be addressed, one of which is keeping the fuel warm. What many conversion vehicles do to remedy this situation is to heat the vegetable oil and starting the vehicle with regular diesel fuel. A few other modifications are generally made to the fuel system to filter the veggie oil before it gets to the combustion chambers. How would you go about performing these operations? Check out this Instructable for directions on how a conversion was done on an older school bus. A few drums were strapped under the bus with the middle one being preheated before sending fuel to the engine. Check out the mad-max style photo above for a glimpse into this conversion.

Don't have a veggie oil conversion but still want to use heat from your engine for something useful? How about for cooking... click here.

[Source: Instructables]