George Sarris is among 21 restaurant owners donating used cooking oil to the City of Hoover, Ala.. "I never thought in my life that we'd cook fish one day and, in the next few days, it would be used for fuel in automobiles," Sarris said.

Abe Einhorn, one of our college interns, came up with this witty phrase to describe what folks are doing in Hoover, Ala.: “turning French fries into freedom fuel.”

Faced with the rising cost of diesel, this Birmingham suburb of 75-thousand residents launched an ambitious recycling program to turn used cooking oil into bio-diesel fuel for 160 trucks in its municipal fleet.

Now, instead of paying upwards of $4 a gallon for petroleum from sometimes hostile foreign regimes, the City of Hoover spends about 1 dollar a gallon making fuel out of grease collected from considerably friendlier places — such as Sarris Cafe, where pleasant servers address customers with such terms of endearment as “Baby” and “Sweetie.”

Mmmm… French fries.

Another endearing aspect of recycled cooking oil is the smell of the exhaust it produces. “If you get behind a dump truck and it smells like french fries, you know it’s a Hoover dump truck,” said Mayor Tony Petelos. For a detailed demonstration of how the city is converting cooking oil into bio-diesel fuel, click on the video below.

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Beyond Grease

Although our story focuses on the novelty of converting grease into bio-diesel, it is only part of Hoover’s alternative energy portfolio.

The city is just days away from shipping its wood waste (trees, branches and other yard debris residents leave on the curb for disposal) to a new ethanol plant in Livingston, Ala.. According to Mayor Petelos, that waste will yield more than 350-thousand gallons of ethanol each year to power an additional 183 vehicles in Hoover’s fleet, including the city’s police cars.

“There’s just no telling what it would do to the import structure of this country if nothing but municipalities were using a common, everyday byproduct that’s in everybody’s kitchen and their back yard,” said Jim Massey, who serves on the board of Gulf Coast Energy, which runs the ethanol plant.

Mayor Petelos predicted that between his city’s yard waste and used cooking oil, Hoover’s municipal fleet is well on its way to energy independence. “By Christmas, we should be close to 90 percent self-sufficient,” he said.

Freedom fuel, indeed.

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