The Conscious Goods Alliance Bus is rolling across the U.S., full of knowledgeable staff and lots of information about many sustainable products. The bus runs on vegetable oil, and is outfitted with green building materials and technologies.

The five member team on board the bus travels from town to town, dispensing information and promotional brochures about a wide variety of green products including, Dr. Bronner's body care products, Sweet Leaf Tea, and Pet Promise pet foods. But the tour is about much more than just providing written materials with enticing pictures and catchy company logos to those who may cross its path.

The Conscious Goods Alliance bus is itself an expression of the future of sustainable transportation. Originally a European airport shuttle built in 1984, the large bus has a diesel engine which now runs primarily on recycled vegetable oil. The diesel engine is the factory original, but the fuel supply lines have been converted to use vegetable oil that is reclaimed from grocery stores and restaurants. The engine needs non-homogenized oils that contain no animal fats, so Asian restaurants, which often use the correct type of oil, are one of the preferred providers of the oil.

Here are two vegetable oil filters that have been inserted into the fuel line that supplies the diesel engine. They are wrapped in coils that warm the oil. Because modern diesel engines require fuel oil that is less viscous than cold vegetable oils, the vegetable oil fuel is warmed before it is fed to the engine.

Currently the bus runs on standard diesel fuel when it starts and until the vegetable oil is heated by the coils above. When the recycled vegetable oil is hot enough, it is fed directly to the diesel engine. There are plans to add a stainless steel fuel tank that can hold bio-diesel fuel. When that tank is added, the bio-diesel will be used to heat the recycled vegetable oil, and the bus will thereby run on some type of sustainable bio-based fuel 100% of the time.

The recycled vegetable oil that fuels the bus is obtained from waste fuel containers at restaurants and grocery stores. It needs to be filtered, to remove contaminants such as crumbs and organic matter that are contained in the oil. One of the drawbacks of this recycled vegetable oil powered bus is that these filters must be changed every 1000 miles. However, that seems a small price to pay for using fuel that is essentially free.

Diesel engines were originally designed to run on peanut oil in the late 1800s by European thermal engineer and inventor Rudolf Diesel. His goal was to provide small provincial farms the ability to utilize motorized tools, such as tractors, that used agriculturally generated fuels such as vegetable and nut oils. This liberated small agrarian farms from having to obtain costly and hard to come-by petroleum based fuels, usually only available in large cities at that time. This original design of the diesel engine makes converting modern diesel engines from using petroleum based fuels to using vegetable based fuels a relatively simple practice. Just throw in a new fuel supply line and some filters, add a vegi fuel tank, and you are on your way.

The shiny steel fuel tank behind these bottles of vegetable oil holds the recycled vegetable fuel oil that powers the diesel engine. The black supply line above the tank is used to fill it with recycled vegetable oil. Just drop the other end of the supply line into a full waste vegetable oil bin, fill the fuel tank, and go!

On several occasions the Conscious Goods Alliance team has pulled the bus into a restaurant parking lot, asked the restaurant owners if it would be OK to fill the fuel tank with the restaurant's waste oil, and upon approval, filled up the fuel tank. Most restaurants are glad to oblige, as waste vegetable oil is expensive to dispose of.

The bus is most often fueled by recycled vegetable oil provided by Whole Foods Market grocery stores. Whole Foods Market carries most of the products promoted on the bus tour. The bus stops at local Whole Foods Market stores whenever they visit a town. Here, the bus is parked in front of the Whole Foods Market store in Berkeley California (above), where the tour stopped during a recent SF Bay Area visit. This particular Whole Foods Market store powers all of its overhead fluorescent lighting with 2,860 square feet of solar panels, which are mounted on its roof.

Besides using recycled vegetable oil as its main source of fuel, the Conscious Goods Alliance tour bus is green in several other ways. Many sustainable materials have been used inside the bus.

Homegrown sprouts are obviously on the menu, as evidenced from this picture of the kitchen area inside the bus (below). The kitchen counter-top underneath the sprouts is made out of recycled compressed paper combined with tree resin. It is a product called PaperStone, and you can learn more about it, and other sustainable building products, at paperstoneproducts.com

The kitchen cabinets underneath the PaperStone countertop (above), as well as the table, bench, and storage spaces shown (left) are made from sustainable bamboo. The floor of the bus is made from coconut palm wood. The bamboo material and coconut palm wood used on the bus was manufactured by Plyboo, a sustainable building materials company. All of these materials were installed into the bus to demonstrate practical uses for these types of sustainable building products.

One of the tour team members, Megan, sits next to the team's community area, which is constructed from cushions made from sustainable materials by Bean Products. The cushions are made of natural rubber to reduce the use of toxic non-recyclable synthetic materials, and off-gassing. The cushion covers, as well as the ceiling cover, are made from biodegradable hemp material.

The Conscious Goods Alliance tour has several major sponsors including drbronner.com, New Chapter Organics, and PetPromise. It was originally the brainchild of Stephen Brooks and Zak Zaidman, founders of Kopali Organics. Before starting Kopali Organics these two visionaries lived at a sustainable permaculture farm in Costa Rica called Punta Mundo. The farm promoted sustainable agricultural practices, and many people began flying to Costa Rica from the U.S. to witness their style of organic, sustainable farming in action. So many people came to visit via airplane, that Brooks began to worry about the amount of greenhouse gases, and the resulting carbon footprint, being generated by the air travel. In an effort to educate those interested in Punta Mundo, while sparing the environment from the air travel, he bought the bus, had it converted to use vegetable oil as fuel, and began the Sustainable Solutions Caravan which carried people from the West Coast of the U.S., through Mexico, to the Punta Mundo project in Costa Rica. Last year, he and Zak Zaidman had the idea of starting the Conscious Goods Alliance bus tour, as a sort of mobile ecological showroom, promoting sustainable products throughout the U.S., and beyond.

  
The back of the bus advertises several sustainable products (above left). A map marking the tour's progress from the East Coast of the U.S. to its present destination (above right), travels with the bus. Below, a tour team member packs up information tables outside the bus at the end of another day of education and outreach about sustainable lifestyles, issues, and products.

One of the major goals of the Conscious Goods Alliance bus tour is to promote what the tour has identified as the Triple Bottom Line approach to business. It is a philosophy that focuses on a social bottom line, and an ecological bottom line, both promoting sustainability, in combination with a more traditional financial bottom line, that being profitability. If you are interested in visiting the tour and bus yourself, be sure to check out the Conscious Goods Alliance Tour Schedule.

image credits SustainablePublic.com