Can I Have Some Biodiesel with My Fries?: How to Ask for Cooking Oil From Restaurants

You've converted your car to run on vegetable oil. You've tuned it up. You've taken a week off work. You've mapped out a route across country to take the new-again car on a virgin run. You've stocked up on foodstuffs for the road. Now you just need one more thing.

Manners.

See, the best thing about converting your car to run on vegetable oil is you can more or less run the thing for free—you just have to remember how to ask nice. Cars fixed up to run on vegetable oil will also run on what the EPA calls "waste cooking oil" or used cooking oil grease. And this is the stuff that restaurants will sometimes be willing to fork over if you make your case.

Restaurants—especially the greasy food-cooking kind you'll most likely be stopping at on the road—generate a lot of waste cooking oil. And it's forbidden to just throw the stuff down the drain. So they end up storing bunches of the stuff—and if you approach them with details of your journey, there's a pretty good chance they'll let you take it off their hands, gratis. So as long as you order sandwich or something, that is.

Keep an eye out for mom and pop diners—fast food chain restaurants are more likely to have strict codes prohibiting giving gifts of greasy used cooking oils away to wayward strangers. Plus, you don't really want to eat that crap anyways. So just pop into a diner or a burger shack, and order a bite. Ask the server if the manager's around, and tell them your situation. S/he'll probably be charmed (or at least intrigued) by your green trip—and you very well might score yourself some free fuel. Finally, you should probably be discreet—using vegetable oil to run your car is technically illegal and punishable by fine put in place by the Bush administration's EPA. Though the new EPA might not be as backwards minded as the Bush-led one, the rule still hasn't been repealed?so tread lightly.