by Erin Link - Follow me on Twitter

Full disclosure: The Big Green Bus is partially funded by Waste Management, Inc., as is Greenopolis.com.

The Big Green Bus is a 100% sustainable vehicle powered by vegetable oil and maintained by students that don’t seems to mind the delightful odor that fuels their cause. They travel throughout the U.S. to communicate with and engage individuals to take responsibility for their actions toward the environment.

The BGB made a recent stop in downtown Houston to refuel their bus on vegetable oil from a local restaurant. The crew of about 15 students, from Dartmouth University, travels from city to city and takes full responsibility for maintaining this hunk of well-crafted, beautiful junk.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all about recapturing and reusing the waste that we generate on a daily basis and harnessing those powers for the good of the environment. But, how beneficial is this process to the whole of society? Why haven’t we all started to make the switch to vegetable oil for powering our vehicles?

The answer, it seems is cost. Many experts say that while the price of using discarded cooking oil is low when few people use it, the macro-economics don’t make sense for widespread usage. The most common source of vegetable oil is wheat and – just as we saw with corn last summer – when it’s used on a large scale as a fuel source, the price rises not just for the fuel, but for the underlying food as well. We need more food in our world, not less.

Add that to the fact that cooking oil is not a really clean-burning fuel and it makes vegetable oil – unused or recycled – a less than perfect solution for our energy problems (at this time, at least). That’s not to say some smart person somewhere won’t find a way to start using all of that fast food oil for good and not evil (Although, the smell of fried oil in a bus for weeks and weeks could, quite possibly, make me nauseated).

Cooking oil as a gasoline substitute? We may be “fueling” ourselves if we think this theory will work (pun intended ;o).

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