Chocolate fuels a carbon-negative voyage from England to Timbuktu

England's BioTruck team aims to promote greener alternatives to fuels like ethanol.

from the December 21, 2007 edition

Page 2 of 2

Page 1 | 2

"Timbuktu is a city that has suffered from the effect of climate change. Once a river port town, the shifting sands of the Sahara have moved the river [12 miles] away and are now threatening the towns [sic] very existence as enormous dunes encroach on the outskirts," according to the BioTruck website.

Chris Elvey, codirector of Ecotec, says he saw an opportunity in the 5,000 tons of waste chocolate that a British company, which prefers not to be named, gets rid of every year. "Chocolate is ideal for making biodiesel," he says.

It contains fat, which when combined with recycled cooking oil can be transformed into the basis for the fuel, and sugar, which can be distilled into ethanol, the other ingredient needed for diesel.

The final product does not smell at all like chocolate, but like paint and looks like runny honey.

"This way we're doing the chocolate factory a favor by taking away their waste, we're doing the local government a favor by occupying less space in their landfills, but most importantly, we're doing the environment a favor by reducing our carbon footprint," says Mr. Elvey.

The demand for biofuel crops, such as corn, over the past couple of years has risen sharply, especially following appeals by President Bush and the European Union to substitute fossil fuels with biofuels.

With the rise in demand, there has been growing questioning of the real environmental and social price of biofuels. In the most recent report on the subject in October, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, called the process of transforming crops into biofuel "a crime against humanity."

Ziegler said he is concerned that biofuels would bring more hunger by pushing the price of some crops to record levels and called for a five-year moratorium on biofuel production. His worries have been echoed by activists in the developing world and economists alike. Environmentalists have also questioned the overall carbon footprint of fuels made from crops as it takes a lot of carbon to run farms and produce fertilizers.

Biofuels made from waste, on the other hand, are a completely different story as they are not made from crops. Besides chocofuel, Elvey's Ecotec produces biodiesel processors like the one the BioTruck team will leave behind in Mali, which use recycled cooking oil as raw material.

With a processor, making biodiesel at home only takes a few hours and costs much less than fossil fuel.

Transforming chocolate into fuel, however, is not yet cost-effective if done at home, says Elvey. And some environmental groups say biofuels from food waste are not viable alternatives to fossil fuels.

BioTruck has already run into some problems on its way to Mali.

When Pag and Grimshaw hit the Pyrenees while crossing into Spain from France, the fuel, which is additive-free, started freezing. They waited a couple of days hoping the temperatures would rise, but had to finally add some regular fuel. This will be taken into account by CarbonAided to assess the trip's total carbon footprint, says Pag in a phone call from the border between Mauritania and Mali. Some bureaucratic problems while entering Morocco further delayed the trip, which is now scheduled to finish in Mali on Sunday.

But Elvey at Ecotec remains positive. "I am a firm believer that we can be self-sustaining because of the amount of rubbish we produce."

1 | Page 2