May 29, 2007--What Works Week: "If You Can Make It Here . . . "

New York City’s mayor Michael Bloomberg got quite a lot of press recently when he announced that the city would require all new taxi cabs to use biofuels. Much less noticed was an emerging plan to have a good deal of that fuel produced right here in NYC.

The NY Times reports that a family-owned company, Metro Fuel, will reopen two of its old refineries, both of which are located in Brooklyn. Until the 1960s there were quite a few local facilities but they were all shut down for economic and environmental reasons. But by next year, two will be on-line again and they will produce 110 million gallons of fuel a year from raw vegetable oil. Much of it recycled grease to be collected from 400 restaurants in the city. This is enough to power the city’s entire heavy truck fleet (thousands of vehicles) and eventually all 1,100 public school boilers. (Article linked below.)

You might imagine that people living in the gentrifying communities where this biodiesel will be produced are up in arms, decrying all the pollution and the stench that will be a byproduct of the refinery process. But they aren’t. Perhaps because they are wanting to be good citizens of the city and the planet; more likely, because these plants are clean and safe—the refining is emission-free and produces little odor. And the resulting fuel does not have to be piped or trucked in—which is a further savings.

This is a good story and one additional example that some of our seemingly intractable problems need not be so intractable. To solve some we do not have to invent much or anything that is new. All we need to do is look around to find what might be working elsewhere, perhaps at small scale; and if it’s working, scale it up by adopting or adapting it locally.

And as the song goes, “If you can make it here [in NYC], you can make it anywhere . . . ”