Portobelo, Panama

Chagres, Panama

Nicaragua

Waste Vegetable Oil Project

Shuttle Stop Project

Middle School Curriculum

Everyday Actions Video

Campus and Community Involvement

 

WASTE VEGETABLE OIL PROJECT

OVERVIEW IPROJECT DETAILS IGET INVOLVED

Overview:
Every day, students at Northwestern bite into their tasty chicken tenders or french fries, not realizing that they have the potential to save the world…ok fine, not really, but they are unknowingly doing something pretty cool. The vegetable oil used to fry our fried food in the dining halls eventually gets old and needs to be replaced. Traditionally, the school pays for that waste oil to be collected and recycled, but that oil is valuable nowadays! Instead of paying to get it taken away, our school could use the oil here on campus to generate electricity.

The idea behind using vegetable oil as a fuel originated from its initial use in the first diesel engines. Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, actually ran his inventions on peanut oil, not diesel like we do today. Therefore, from the start, diesel engines in trucks, trains, boats, and generators have had the ability to run on vegetable oils like soybean oil and canola oil. However, diesel fuel has been remarkably cheap for a long period of time, making the use of vegetable oils economically unviable…until now.

Vegawatt, a small company from Boylston, MA, sells a generator that runs on waste vegetable oil that can be installed right outside a kitchen like the ones here at school. The company has automated the entire process of filtering and using the vegetable oil, making the user’s job much easier. All that needs to be done is to put the oil in the generator’s tank and let it run! People interested in getting familiar with the project can learn all about the filtration process for waste vegetable oil and why an automated system is so useful.

In the coming year, our team will be writing proposals to and working with the school and our food service provider, Sodexo, to get a waste vegetable oil-powered generator installed on campus. Our goal is to be coordinating the installation and use of the generator by the end of the summer of 2010.

Contact:

Sam Malin

Cell: (914)400-5162

e-mail: sam.malin@u.northwestern.edu

Check out the video:

Green My Ride

IDEA398:

Final Report

WVO Presentation