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[Announcer] Chicago is a city of green -
a city that safeguards its precious environment.
Welcome to "Chicago at Play."
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[Announcer] What does used cooking oil have to do
with the Chicago Park Districts fleet of vehicles?
It's the renewable source
that keeps the Park District's force running on a full tank.
[Kyle Powers] We're really excited about it, this is a great opportunity
for the Chicago Park District to lead by example and honor one
of our core values which is being green.
We're taking basically a waste product and turning
that into a renewable fuel that can be used in all
of our diesel turbo combustion engines.
[Pete Probst] Biodiesel is made from vegetable oil
but it's been chemically modified
to reduce the viscosity, so that way when you use it
in a diesel engine it operates the same way
as petroleum diesel would.
[Kyle Powers] You take used cooking oil, which is what we're using
or soybean oil, any type of fat or vegetable oil and you run it
through a process called transesterification.
Basically you take 80 or 90 percent
of the used vegetable oil add about 10-15 percent methanol
with a catalyst which would be potassium methylate
and that turns it into the raw biodiesel fatty acid methyl
esters and the byproduct which would be glycerin.
We're actually converting our glycerin, we're using it
in an anaerobic digester for local energy production
and then we're taking the raw biodiesel,
the fatty acid methyl esters and purifying
that a little bit more to have it meet the ASTM D6751 spec
and then at that point it can become biodiesel.
[Announcer] Biodiesel is the only clean burning alternative fuel
that has passed the health effects testing requirements
of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.
[Pete Probst] Biodiesel's got a lot of positive attributes especially
because we can produce it here.
All the feedstock's sourced locally here in Chicago area
and we don't have to go overseas to get the oil.
It also burns a lot cleaner
and it doesn't contribute to global warming.
[Kyle Powers] The used cooking oil version of biodiesel has been proven
to save about 80 percent reduction
on the carbon life cycle as compared to petroleum diesel.
[Announcer] The Park District has recently completed building a biodiesel
processing plant to convert recycled cooking oil
into biodiesel.
[Pete Probst] We're still kind of getting up and running
but we should be able to do at 275-gallon batch
in an eight hour shift.
We're using about 200,000 gallons per year
and we can distribute anywhere between 50
and 100 thousand gallons of both petroleum and biodiesel.
Biodiesel can be used in any diesel vehicle,
we can set the blend level to anything we want,
so we'll just stage it in,
in various increments to start with.
We'll be distributing it in different blends,
anywhere from B5, which is 5% biodiesel,
B10 which is 10% biodiesel all the way up 10 100%.
We can use it in all of our diesel pickups,
all of our diesel vans, our diesel lawnmowers,
our diesel front end loaders,
all of our agricultural equipment, our tractors
on the beach can run on 100% biodiesel,
a number of different applications
within the Park District.
[Announcer] Darling International is America's leading provider
of recycling, recovery and rendering solutions
to the nations food industry- taking waste products
like used cooking oil and recycling them into materials
that manufacturers can turn
into commercial products, like biodiesel.
[Jerome Levy] We're very proud to be a strategic partner
with the Chicago Park District
in providing our recycling services in conjunction
with the Park Districts Biodiesel project.
So what Darling International does is picks up,
removes in a legal
and environmentally safe manner all the wastes, fats and oils
and recycles them and supplies that product
to the Chicago Park District.
[Kyle Powers] The donation of grease basically cuts
out about 85-90 percent of the production costs.
[Announcer] Indigenous Energy will be on hand
at the Park District's processing plant
to over see the day-to-day operations.
[Kyle Powers] We have Indigenous Energy who is coming
in to operate our facility for us,
they're a professional operator,
they have the expertise and knowledge
to make sure we're producing spec fuel and they're also able
to maintain this facility, do the testing for us as well
and make sure everything is running smoothly for us.
[Pete Probst] We're excited to be a young company in Chicago and working
on renewable projects because we feel like it's a matter
of survival for our planet.
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[Kyle Powers] It's part of our core value of being green,
it's a renewable fuel, it's energy security
trying lead the charge
in making Chicago as green as possible.
[Jerome Levy] We're talking about energy independence and that's first
and foremost, there's dwindling resources right now,
if we could find a good source of renewable fuels right here
in our own country, which we do have,
in vegetable oils everybody should be behind that
and also Chicago has always been a leading city
in the future and this is a perfect opportunity
to once again be a leader.
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