TodayDickinson’s Green and Greasy
From fast food to biodiesel
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Matt Steinman, a Dickinson College employee, shows a jar of biodiesel made from recycled grease from businesses around town. The fuel will power a college vehicle.(Jason Malmont/The Sentinel)
Who ever would have thought that fried food would end up doing anything besides skyrocketing one’s cholesterol level?
But with the rise in popularity of biodiesel fuel — which is derived from biological sources such as vegetable oil — the fried chicken wings you felt guilty about eating today could indeed end up helping the environment tomorrow — especially if you live in the Carlisle area.
After committing to a biodiesel program following the suggestion of several students, Dickinson College is giving new use to wasted cooking oil by converting it into biodiesel fuel. The biodiesel is then used in college equipment, including its garbage truck and several lawn mowers.
Matt Steiman, Dickinson’s biodiesel project supervisor, says the school picks up barrels full of old fryer oil from places like the Army War College, Bonanza and Groucho’s roughly once a week and later converts it into biodiesel fuel using a chemical process.
“Commonly they pay a vendor to come pick it up,” Steiman says of the participating restaurants. “We pick it up for free. That’s why they like us so much.”
A tall man whose long brown hair is crowned with a backwards baseball cap, Steiman grows modest when asked about his role in creating biodiesel fuel for the campus. But don’t let the unassuming air fool you.
As Randy Nenninger, Dickinson’s manager of grounds, will tell you, Steiman is a leader in the biodiesel field who whipped his first batch of the fuel with the help of a chemistry professor at Wilson College.
“We came up with a basic process for it,” Steiman says.
Basic chemical process
After joining the staff at Dickinson, Steiman helped build the reactor that sits in the small room of the school’s facilities management building.
Assisted by his two interns — who receive an environmental studies credit for participating — Steiman says it takes about a full day to convert the oil into biodiesel. The process, at least as he explains it, is simple.
Steiman adds methanol, which is used in racing fuel, and lye, a caustic, to the processor. Eventually, with a little help from Steiman and the interns, what emerges from the machine is the biodiesel fuel.
“It’s a very straightforward chemical process,” Steiman says.
Twice a week, the fuel is loaded into campus equipment. Right now, Steiman says, the equipment runs on a 50/50 mix of biodiesel and diesel fuel. While he would prefer it to be 100 percent, Steiman says, the blend — which burns cleaner than pure diesel — is enough to decrease diesel emissions into the air.
“Even a 20 percent blend has a significant impact on the overall emissions,” he says. “Anything that’s diesel can run on biodiesel.”
Biodiesel also reduces CO2 emissions, which contribute to global warming. While Dickinson is only one entity, Nenninger said more and more farmers are embracing biodiesel — which, if they convert it themselves — could be a cheaper alternative to diesel.
“We’re trying to do what we can to help mitigate global warming,” Steiman added.
Developing by-product
Besides being easier on the environment, there is another beneficial side effect of the conversion process — soap.
During the biodiesel process, glycerol is drained from the reactor, which Steiman and the students later convert into soap.
Thus far, the soap, which resembles a giant piece of free-form caramel, has been relegated to the rest-rooms at the facilities management building, but the availability could be extended throughout the campus.
“We want to try to get a stamp of a green devil (Dickinson’s sustainability mascot) and give it away to students at orientation or sell it in the bookstore,” says Becki Walker, Dickinson’s sustainability specialist,
Walker says Steiman and the students are working on ways to make the soap more attractive. So far, the soap has been shaped into hearts, stars and butterflies. One ambitious student even used lavender to scent the soap, but Walker says the process was too consuming.
“It took a lot of work to get it to smell that way,” she says.
Still, if they can perfect the technique, Walker believes the soap would be a big seller.
“It would be a distinctive Dickinson thing,” she said.
Until that happens, Steiman and the other program participants are concentrating on upping production of the biodiesel. Right now, Steiman estimates he converts about 50 gallons of fryer oil in to biodiesel per week, but his hope is to reach 200.
“It’s exciting. We’re always improving our process,” he said. “We’ve set the goal of increasing production by next semester.”
