By Anna Geanopoulos
July 7, a group of 12 students from Dartmouth University parked their Big Green Bus in front of Forsyth Park to talk about sustainability.
Their bus runs on used cooking oil, uses solar panels, contains deep cycle batteries to store the energy from those panels, sports bamboo floors and is, of course, painted bright green. Savannah is the eleventh city they’ve visited on an 11 and a half week tour around the perimeter of the United States. Their goal: to get people to make a commitment for environmental change.
“This year we redesigned our educational program to focus more on the individual impact that people have. People tend to get overwhelmed when it comes to these environmental issues so we really wanted to give people some of their power back and make them feel like they have a meaningful role in these issues,” said Ben Paly, an environmental studies major and crew member.
The Big Green Bus project began in 2005 when a group of Ultimate Frisbee players decided to buy a diesel-powered school bus to get to a tournament across the country in Seattle. Some of the team members were engineering majors and decided to convert the diesel engine into one that runs on vegetable oil.
“As they traveled across the country, they realized there was more to their project than simply traveling to an Ultimate Frisbee tournament,” said Merritt Jenkins, a member of last year’s team. “The Big Green Bus became an educational tool. Six years and three buses later, the Big Green Bus has a strictly educational focus. It still runs on waste vegetable oil, but the veggie system is significantly more advanced. Solar panels power our interior lighting, refrigerator and television.”
Paly explained how they get their used vegetable oil from “mom-and-pop-style greasy restaurants” they encounter on the road. They contact the restaurants ahead of time and ask for the donation of used oil and put it in the tank. The engine can’t run on the dirty oil straight from the pan, so the bus’s holding tank has a system that filters out unnecessary things before the combustion process begins.
The Dartmouth students travel on the bus but lodge with relatives, Dartmouth alumni and members of the community in each city. While in Savannah, the crew slept in Oglethorpe House.
At the event in Forsyth, the Big Green Bus crew invited the citizens of Savannah to make an energy pledge. They asked people in every town they visit to make five out of seven small changes in their personal lives to save energy.
If you missed the Big Green Bus in Savannah but would like to know more you can follow the Bus around the nation and learn more by visiting their website.
