In City Times ~ Grease Monkeys

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All it takes is some grease!

You access the special tank through the trunk.

Grease filtering system

Internal filter

All you need is a funnel

A flip of a switch let's you change between diesel and grease!

Turn the key and your off!

Grease Monkeys

A hardy little band of Worcester activists wants to turn Worcester on to vegetable oil powered cars!

Learn everything you need to know to SAVE GAS, MONEY & THE ENVIRONMENT.

Plus: car-engine conversion diagram

They meet over organic, vegetarian dinners and talk about changing the world - one car at a time. Yes, the Worcester Vegetable Oil Co-op, is a hardy little band of activists who are doing what folks in Cambridge, Northampton and every other progressive burg in Massachusetts are doing - saying NO to expensive, terrorist-tainted, environmentally toxic gasoline and YES to the contents of the humble Fry-olator: used cooking oil. Instead of heading out to the self-service station they drive to the Chophouse and Sole Proprietor to pick up the restaurants' used grease. Then the adventure begins. "We want to get vegetable oil in cars," group co-founder David Schmidt, 24, says. "We want to expand this and help more people learn about biofuels."

Which smell yummier than gasoline when you drive around and don't produce any atmosphere-clogging particulate. That's the crap that gives us the Green House effect, which is slowly but surely destroying our environment (say goodbye to the Polar bear and hello to extreme, whacked-out weather) and our health (asthma rates in kids are higher along bus routes).

Did you know a quarter of a million gallons of waste food oil is produced annually in Worcester?! There's even a guy in Worcester County who the young people decline to identify but who is so passionate about vegetable oil that he has concocted a furnace that enables him to heat his house with grease. He saved thousands of dollars this winter.

Last month Worcester's grease Co-op hosted a public information forum at the Worcester Pubic Library. They brought their Volkswagens - only cars, vans and trucks powered-by diesel gasoline can be converted to grease cars - website addresses and a bunch of great information to the general public. Folks seemed interested.

Member Anne Lewenberg, who was also at the event educating the public, says her dad bought her a Volkswagen for college graduation. An environmentalist, she says she's helping to save our air. Plus she's saved hundreds of dollars tooling around in her vegetable oil car.

Converting the engine wasn't so hard. She paid $800 for a conversion kit that she bought in Greenfield from distributors GREASECAR.COM. She and a friend did the mechanical work in four days. She says lots of people can do the work in two. "I use seventy five percent less diesel [gasoline] than I did before," Anne says, adding that to tool around Worcester used to cost her $36 a week in gas - now she spends $36 a month. Her driving habits haven't changed; her only caveat: "You have to start and stop on diesel, and you have to drive for five minutes before you switch to grease, and on colder days it takes longer to warm up [the vegetable oil]." The grease needs to be less viscous in order for it to run through the car with ease. She says: "Where grease is really lucrative is the longer commute." Grease cars can run off peanut oil, coconut oil, and cannola oil. The guy - Diesel - who invented the diesel engine, designed it to run off practically any kind of cheap-o fuel.

The group members now share the responsibility of picking up the hundreds of gallons of grease oil. Then they take the stuff home and let it settle, which takes a couple of days. Next they filter it through a filter that looks like a large sock and is appropriately named a sock filter. Then the filtered oil goes right into the separate grease tank that they've installed in their car (buy the kit!). At this point they are using a 5-gallon container and funnel to pour the oil in, but you can get a pump. Co-op members are asking folks in Worcester County to join them! Five or so bucks a year (member dues) may be all it takes to become more environmentally aware and less cash-strapped.

To learn more about grease cars, conversion kits, people who can help, see side bar. And to join the Worcester grease car co-op e-mail Anne at anne[at]riseup.net.

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