It's one thing to cov­er your truck in a colour­ful body stick­er rem­i­nis­cent of the en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly con­scious 60s. It's quite an­oth­er thing try to save the en­vi­ron­ment by run­ning it on used veg­etable oil. But that's Troy Hadeed's plan. Hadeed's psy­che­del­i­cal­ly-coloured truck is the call­ing card of his new com­pa­ny: Ecoim­pact. In part­ner­ship with TSTT's Live Green, Live Clean cam­paign, Ecoim­pact plans to fa­cil­i­tate and pro­mote us­ing re­cy­cled veg­gie oil as fu­el as a way to man­age the dis­pos­al of cook­ing oil and re­duce car­bon emis­sions in T&T.

TSTT has al­ready com­mit­ted to eco-friend­ly waste dis­pos­al by en­sur­ing that its in­ter­nal waste–bat­ter­ies, pa­per, oils and ink ton­er–is safe­ly dis­posed of by ac­cred­it­ed ma­te­r­i­al re­cy­clers, in ac­cor­dance with in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards. Hadeed com­mend­ed TSTT for sup­port­ing Ecoim­pact and oth­ers who want to en­sure that T&T's mod­erni­sa­tion takes place through sus­tain­able, green meth­ods. The un­safe prac­tices of cook­ing oil dis­pos­al threat­en that bal­ance. "There's no one col­lect­ing used cook­ing oil, and the laws about cook­ing oil dis­pos­al are not en­forced. So it's ei­ther frozen and thrown away, or poured down the drain," Hadeed ex­plained. "And that's an en­vi­ron­men­tal haz­ard."

Ac­cord­ing to the US En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, a gal­lon of diesel pro­duces 22 pounds of car­bon diox­ide (CO2) emis­sions. And it's wide­ly ac­cept­ed that car­bon emis­sions are linked to glob­al warm­ing. But veg­etable oil is a car­bon-neu­tral fu­el, Hadeed said: "It emits on­ly as much CO2 as it ab­sorbed while grow­ing in the field as plants. It's a win-win in terms of im­prov­ing T&T eco im­pact." Hadeed al­ready owns one suc­cess­ful and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly-con­scious busi­ness: Mys­tic Hemp sells clothes and oth­er prod­ucts made of or­gan­ic in­gre­di­ents like hemp. To prove that us­ing veg­gie oil fu­el is not some hip­pie fan­ta­sy, Hadeed con­vert­ed his SsangY­ong Mus­so truck's diesel en­gine to run on a dual tank�one for diesel, one for veg­etable oil. For the last five months he's has been dri­ving around Trinidad fu­eled by re­cy­cled oil from pop­corn fry­ers.

Since the switch, Hadeed said that there's been no change in the ve­hi­cle's per­for­mance, or de­crease in the week and a half's worth of mileage he'd nor­mal­ly get from a diesel en­gine. When he drove the truck back on­to the lot where he pur­chased it two years ago, the head me­chan­ic was amazed by how qui­et the Mer­cedes en­gine was. In­stead of pro­duc­ing clouds of fa­mil­iar sooty smoke, the SsangY­ong Mus­so emits no vis­i­ble ex­haust. "And when I get out of my ve­hi­cle, I smell pop­corn." Ecoim­pact plans to cam­paign wide­ly so that pri­vate com­pa­nies like TSTT and gov­ern­ment agen­cies like the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) can get on board with this eco-friend­ly project. Ecoim­pact of­fers to pick up used cook­ing oil from restau­rants for a small fee, fil­ter, store and make it avail­able to those with con­vert­ed en­gines.

The veg­gie oil costs near­ly noth­ing, com­pared to diesel, Hadeed said, es­pe­cial­ly if a com­pa­ny wants to col­lect their own oil and set up a fil­tra­tion sys­tem. In­di­vid­u­als can form co-op­er­a­tives where each per­son pays an an­nu­al fee to get ac­cess to the co-op's fil­tra­tion sys­tems and free fu­el. Con­vert­ing the en­gine, how­ev­er, costs about TT$15,000, which may be pro­hib­i­tive for in­di­vid­u­als. And there isn't enough waste cook­ing oil pro­duced in T&T to ser­vice every sin­gle diesel en­gine in the coun­try, he ad­mit­ted. But com­pa­nies with diesel-pow­ered fleets could ab­sorb the cost of the con­ver­sion and see sav­ings in the long run.

"Com­pa­nies like the Pub­lic Trans­port Ser­vice Cor­po­ra­tion spend thou­sands of dol­lars on diesel per week. Eco­nom­i­cal­ly and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly, it's worth­while for them to con­vert," he said.

There's lots of room for com­pa­nies to part­ner with Ecoim­pact. Do­na­tions of stor­age con­tain­ers, fil­tra­tion sys­tems, hoses, ad­ver­tis­ing, as well as fi­nan­cial sup­port, are wel­come. Each com­pa­ny that as­sists will be award­ed the Ecoim­pact Seal of Ac­tion, and will be list­ed on the com­pa­ny's Web site so that en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly con­scious con­sumers can make in­formed choic­es about which com­pa­nies to pa­tro­n­ise. TSTT, Mys­tic Hemp, Unit­ed Au­to and Per­for­mance, Sign­wave and Ce­ram­ic T&T Ltd are al­ready spon­sors.

For more in­fo, call 623-7587,

e-mail ecoim­pact@live.com or

vis­it ecoim­pact-trinidad.com.