Local Food to Local Fuel

Every Friday Forrest Letarte leaves his finance job in Boston and drives the two hours to his parents' house in Tamworth.

But he doesn’t come home to play.

"So this is a 1,500 gallon vacuum truck. A lot of people drive around, they think we're part of the septic industry, but we're actually not and never were. This is our chariot." SFX: Engine firing up.

Forrest drives his chariot to participating restaurants from Concord to Jackson.

SFX: Truck back up alarm.

"So were backing up to the Corner House right now, and we'll suck out one of these barrels."

He’s come to pick up their waste vegetable oil, stuff the restaurants can’t use anymore.

SFX: sucking oil

"It depends how cold it is outside but it'll probably suck a 55 gallon barrel in less than a minute."

He takes the oil to his dad's garage in Tamworth.

There he’s set up a home-made processing plant to turn the vegetable oil into B100, or biodiesel.

Letarte is the 25 year old C-E-O of Our Town Biodiesel.

He started the company with his dad a little over a year ago.

"I was actually watching Dirty Jobs. There was some guy who had done it, kind of on a small scale. But he had a decent looking home refinery and I was like I wonder if you could actually do that as a business."

Last year the company sold 4,500 gallons of biodiesel.

This year they expect sales to increase by 40 or 50 percent.

Letarte prices his biodiesel to compete with local home heating oil, so usually it costs about the same.

But when oil prices spiked last year his costs didn't go up.

He was able to sell for 50 cents less per gallon.

The company is cashing in on people's desire to reduce their carbon footprint and their dependence on foreign oil.

But Letarte wanted even stronger incentives to get people involved.

"What is a restaurant doing with their oil currently? Why would they want to give it to me? It's really giving it back to the patrons and to the other people and to the environment. So I thought it would be a good benefit to the restaurants, the restaurant owners and the patrons as well."

What he came up with is the local foods to local fuels program.

"Any of the restaurants that we collect their oil and recycle into biodiesel should have a sticker."

The sticker tells people which restaurants are recycling their old vegetable oil.

Participants are also listed on Our Town's website.

The hope is that customers will want to patronize restaurants that take environmental conservation seriously.

Dan Brown, owner of the Corner House Inn in Center Sandwich, says he's proud to have the sticker on his door.

Our Town has also saved them money.

"We were paying for it to be hauled away. At one point it got quite expensive. From a business sense that was a great option for us when people locally wanted to recycle it."

Letarte says his company currently supplies about 15 customers with biodiesel.

Most use it in place of home heating oil.

But not all.

SFX: Story Land Safari ride.

Story Land in Glen not only gives their used vegetable oil to Our Town, they also purchase biodiesel.

Storyland maintenance coordinator Chris Marcioni.

"Every piece of diesel equipment we have on the property, which is the safari, John Deere tractor, John Deere loader backhoe, a Gradall, a construction lift, a JLG aerial lift, they all have different diesel engines in them, they all run great on it."

Letarte would have to register to collect gas taxes before Our Town can sell biodiesel for cars and trucks.

So for now, if you want to take a trip powered by vegetable oil, catch Storyland’s Safari ride.

For N-H-P-R News in Bartlett, I'm Erik Eisele.