by flagamuffin

Rapidly becoming my favorite New Yorker pieces -- long writeups of niche industries (cf the tugboat story) that walk the line between investigative journalism and disbelieving, snobbish entertainment stories.

The process isn’t tidy. The wastewater has to be cooked off, and the scraps of hash browns and wontons and buffalo wings filtered out—to say nothing of the old shoes, dirty diapers, and used hypodermic needles that can end up in a bin in a back alley. But used cooking oil, correctly processed, burns eighty per cent cleaner than fossil fuels, has a smaller carbon footprint than corn ethanol, and doesn’t compete with the food supply. Nathanael Greene, at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me that it provides “probably the best of the biofuels out there.”