British Fight Climate Change With Fish and Chips

As he has done frequently over the last 18 months, Andy Roost drove his blue diesel Peugeot 205 onto a farm, where signs pointed one way for “eggs” and another for “oil.”

He unscrewed the gas cap and chatted nonchalantly as Colin Friedlos, the proprietor, poured three large jugs of used cooking oil — tinted green to indicate environmental benefit — into the Peugeot’s gas tank.

Mr. Friedlos operates one of hundreds of small plants in Britain that are processing, and often selling to private motorists, used cooking oil, which can be poured directly into unmodified diesel cars, from Fords to Mercedes.

Last year, when the price of crude oil topped $147 a barrel, a number of large companies in Europe and the United States were spurred to set up plants to collect and refine used cooking oil into biodiesel.

The global recession and the steep drop in oil prices have now killed many of those large refining ventures. But smaller, simpler ones like Mr. Friedlos’s are moving in to fill the void with their direct-to-tank product, having been deluged by offers of free oil from restaurants.

A tumble of tin containers now sit on the farm. Some dealers here offer fill-ups in suburban yards and barns. Others — like John Nicholson, founder of a small company in Wales — deliver jugs of green car fuel to the doors of hundreds of customers, much like a vehicular milkman.

more from the NY Times