EMISSIONS:If animal fat can be made into biodiesel, why not human fat? It's not like we don't have plenty to spare, writes Killian Doyle
IT WAS Earth Hour last Saturday night. An estimated billion people switched off the lights for an hour to focus on climate change. Many of you may have joined in, passing the time sitting quietly in the dark reflecting on how best to greenify your lives.
Me? I spent it trawling the internet for novel ways to fuel my cars. And quickly deduced there are some very odd people out there. Very odd indeed.
Did you know, for example, about the US poultry firms turning waste chicken gunge into biodiesel to fuel trucks? I imagine they fly along. There are also US plants gleefully mixing beef and pig tallow with soyabean oil to create biodiesel. It may sound gross, but I bet it smells like barbecue.
Putting squeamishness aside, using animal fats for fuel makes sense. Fat – animal or vegetable – contains triglycerides that can be extracted and converted into diesel. Apparently, processing one litre of fat will give you one litre of fuel. There is no noticeable difference in fuel economy and nothing but clean fumes are belched into the fatmosphere.
All very clever. But why stop at animals?
One chap who didn’t was a Californian cosmetic surgeon who got into trouble last year after claiming to have turned the lard he’d sucked out of his patients during liposuction into biodiesel. Dr Craig Bittner said he used it to power his Ford SUV and his girlfriend’s Lincoln Navigator and that it was done with patients’ consent.
“Not only do they get to lose their love handles or chubby belly, but they get to take part in saving the Earth,” he wrote on his lipodiesel.com website before it went offline.
His boast has since been dismissed as a flabrication. Notwithstanding the logistics of turning human lipids into biodiesel in a Los Angeles office, Lincoln never made a diesel-engined Navigator.
It has been suggested that his tale was invented to explain away how he managed to dump thousands of gallons of gunk without paying for certified medical waste disposal. Who am I to say?
The dodgy doc has since skived off to South America to evade the lawsuits being fired his way by former patients, presumably safe in the knowledge their lawyers have fat chance of catching up with him to get their pound of flesh.
Whether fibbing or not, it has to be said the doctor may well have been onto something. Why not use human blubber to power cars? It’s not like most of us don’t have plenty to spare.
There is precedent, after all. New Zealand adventurer Pete Bethune and two of his Earthrace crewmates had several gallons of body fat hoovered out and turned into biodiesel to fuel their round-the-world trimaran last year. Admittedly, it was a publicity stunt that yielded barely enough to get the yoke out of the harbour. But still, it shows it can be done.
Some bright spark should develop a portable liposuction device attached to a small biodiesel-refining machine so motorists could suck fat out of their bloated buttocks and bingo wings and straight into their fuel tanks. They could then refuel at any one of the drive-thru restaurants that would spring up on every corner to service them.
As with all my genius schemes, there are a few stumbling blocks. Skinny folk would end up looking like Kate Moss on a bender after a few hundred miles and the human-powered cars would have dreadfully high cholesterol. So, my plan is not perfect. It needs fleshing out, I admit.
Taking this idea to its logical conclusion, maybe we should start sucking the fat out of dead people? Instead of burying their loved ones, people could process their corpses before pouring them into their tanks. Personally, I’d quite relish that.
You know me – I like to make myself useful, even in death.