Not Your Average Bus Trip: How “Green” is That Green Bus? Part 1

This is the first in a series by Heather Perry. All posts in the series will be available here.

Sometimes I laugh in disbelief when I think back to my first summer after graduating college when I found myself, without really planning for it, living on a short school bus that was running off none other than pure, 100% waste vegetable oil.  I had no idea at the time that this trip would become the learning experience of a lifetime, which would to some extent alter the path of my life due to the critical environmental issues that surfaced around it.  This wasn’t some trip that I signed myself up for with a group of people to go along for the ride.  Rather, this was the result of my two best friends, Jen and Darcy, and I, wanting to road trip around the country and stumbling on an adorable, bright green short bus that had been converted by Lovecraft Biofuels to run on filtered veggie oil.  How could we turn it down?

We couldn’t.  And so the three of us purchased this bus before knowing what to do with it.  We just thought we’d figure it out, right?  With the help of a few engineering and geology buddies at our school, we were able to retrofit the inside of the bus to sleep the three of us, and have a fourth if they were willing to sleep in the hammock.  Aesthetics taken care of, we needed to figure out how to actually fuel our bus with veggie oil.

We started by talking to numerous people who had been doing this exact thing.  Exact isn’t quite the right word to use here.  We couldn’t actually find anyone who had attempted to filter oil while on the road.  This was going to be a new challenge.  We did, however, find out that typically the best, and least work-intensive method of filtering oil is to use gravity filtration.  Most people have set-ups for this in their garage, where they have ample space, and can let the oil stand for up to two weeks.  After letting the oil settle, allowing any water or sediment to fall to the bottom, the top, translucent layer can be poured through a filter.  Much like a coffee filter, the oil will flow through the filter powered solely by gravity, and then be left to settle further, allowing any remaining fine particles to sink to the bottom of the barrel.  Additionally, heat can be used to help settle any water content out of the oil.  The system could be made easily at home, or even purchased online, but we were facing a major obstacle: we wouldn’t be stopping anywhere for long enough to settle the oil.

It was suddenly the day we were to set off on our road trip and we had yet to solidify any sort of oil filtration system.  We just had to go for it.