Green Grease Project

Launched in January 2010 with support from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Green Grease Capivara project began as a conversation among CoLab, members of the MIT Biodiesel Club and the local São Paulo chapter of Brazil’s national union of catadores (waste pickers) exploring strategies for utilizing waste vegetable oil as fuel. The solution, which marries an innovative vehicle conversion technique designed to fit the needs of waste picker cooperatives with a novel implementation and dissemination strategy that extends into nine Brazilian cities, was recently awarded the $3,000 prize at the prestigious MIT IDEAS competition.

Catadores are among the poorest and most marginalized people in Brazil. They are mainly women, children, recent migrants, unemployed, disabled and the elderly. In nearly all cases, trash picking is last alternative to starvation. In Brazil, it estimated 500,000 people. In São Paulo, a group of 300 waste pickers has come together to form a trash recycling cooperative, the Rede CataSampa.

Seeking to leverage the catadores’ skills, needs, and available resources, a team of MIT students led by CoLab Research Fellow Libby McDonald created an easy, low-cost diesel engine conversion method that, by nearly eliminating vehicle fuel costs, reduces cooperative expenses by 20%, boosting the catadores’ income while reducing waste vegetable oil in rivers, streams, and lakes.

In August of 2010, the team ran a workshop in CRUMA, a well-established São Paulo cooperative, that taught catadores: 1) the simple, low-tech method for converting diesel engines to run on waste vegetable oil; 2) how to filter waste vegetable oil; and 3) the best modes of waste vegetable oil collection. In addition to teaching catadores the method of conversion, by using the cooperatives’ twelve trucks as demonstration vehicles, work completed during the course of the workshop nearly eliminated fuel costs for the waste picker union’s network of twenty co-ops.

In order to expand the project’s impact, a team of two to three São Paulo catadores traveled to eight other cities where vehicles were converted and catadores were trained to maintain trucks, to properly collect waste vegetable oil, and to filter oil for their coops.