Smyrna aims to fuel fleet with cooking oil

By Jeffry Scott

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The way Smyrna’s fleet of city vehicles is headed, starting next month the air will be a little cleaner and occasionally residents might catch a whiff of french fries or fried doughnuts when a truck drives past.

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Johnny Crawford, Johnny Crawford Waste cooking oil from restaurants can be taken and converted into vehicle fuel. In this 2009 photo, Spencer Gordon collects oil.

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Becky Stein, Special Restaurants in Smyrna will be encouraged to donate their used cooking oil to the city for use as biodiesel fuel.

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The trucks will be running on a fuel mix that includes biodiesel, which is repurposed cooking oil the city plans to collect from as many as 150 restaurants that fry food. They will donate the oil rather than pay to have it disposed of.

Smyrna is joining at least two other Georgia cities — Roswell and Tybee Island on the Georgia coast — in making use of Department of Energy federal stimulus funds to start and run biodiesel programs for their fleets. Biodiesel can be used interchangeably with petroleum-based diesel with little or no modifications to vehicles.

City officials said the $208,000 DOE grant that entirely funds the program is almost as beneficial for city sewers as it is for the air. “We modeled our program after one in Hoover, Ala., and they started it to get the oil out of the sewers,” said Ann Kirk, executive director of Keep Smyrna Beautiful. “That’s one of our main goals, too.”

Smyrna will use the federal money to expand an existing public works building to accommodate two 55-gallon biodiesel processing plants with storage tanks and containers. It aims to have the operation up and running by the end of January.

The city already is asking residents to donate used cooking oil (not grease) in sealed containers, such as milk cartons, at the Smyrna Recycling Center, 645 Smyrna Hill Drive.

Once the program is up and running, it will be phased in as supplemental fuel for the city’s fleet, with the idea that eventually some of the city’s trucks will run entirely on the repurposed cooking oil, Kirk said.

Smyrna projects biodiesel will reduce the fleet’s consumption of fossil fuel diesel by 25 percent and save the city about $25,000 a year.

The plan will start slowly with two to four water and sewer service trucks. Its success will depend greatly on residents and businesses donating the used cooking oil.

“We have informally contacted a few restaurants, and they are excited about the program,” Kirk said.

The city plans to give “some kind of recognition” to the restaurants who donate oil, hoping that will spur more residents to do the same. Over the past few weeks the city has collected about 40 gallons of peanut oil from people who fried turkeys over the holidays. “So maybe the air will smell more like turkeys than french fries,” Kirk said.

Roswell has begun collecting used oil from residents to get its program rolling as early as next year, said Sharon Izzo, an engineering consultant who is working with the city on biodiesel. The city is talking to restaurants to see how much oil they can and will contribute to the program.

It’s hard to say how much of the Roswell fleet will eventually run on fuel using cooking oil. “The actual number of fleet vehicles which might use biodiesel would depend on the amount of biodiesel that the city could produce,” Izzo said.