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Lindsay Madeira, SIS ’06
A dozen students stood in the kitchen of Lindsay Madeira ’06, shaking mason jars of vegetable oil and trying to turn it into fuel. It was a spring Saturday, and their lesson in biofuel wasn’t for credit. They’d come on their own to spend the day learning to run cars on the kind of fuel Madeira makes from used cooking oil.
She has converted her car to run on biodiesel, which she produces from used vegetable oil that she gets free from restaurants. The garage behind her home off 16th Street is a maze of hoses, tubes, and tanks that she built herself to produce the fuel, 35 gallons at a time.
Factoring in such costs as the ethanol and sodium hydroxide catalyst she blends with the waste oil, her fuel costs about 70 cents a gallon. But Madeira knew very little about chemistry or engineering when she came to AU for the Natural Resources and Sustainable Development (NRSD) master’s program, whose students study both at the School of International Service and the United Nations–chartered University of Peace in Costa Rica.
Lindsay Madeira shares her knowledge of producing the biofuel that powers her car with AU students.
When interning in a Nicaraguan village for a renewable energy nonprofit during her exchange year in Costa Rica, she found herself faced with a peculiar challenge for someone who had been a communications major: she had to design a solar oven.
She soon saw that existing solar ovens were gathering cobwebs; they worked neither in the rainy season, nor for the villagers’ tortillas. Instead, Madeira designed a fuel-efficient stove and low-voltage solar panel system. It turned out she had a flair for do-it-yourself engineering. And unlike the ovens, the people really used them.
Madeira is now AU’s sustainability coordinator, helping to shepherd the university’s environmental efforts.
While she hasn’t yet run her car on waste oil from AU’s cafeterias, a Montgomery County farmer does load up on the used cooking oil every few weeks at the Mary Graydon Center and uses it to fuel his farm’s tractors. Two of AU’s vehicles also use biofuel, considered by many to be a cleaner burning renewable alternative to petroleum. AU’s biofuel comes from the Naval Exchange depot.
Can a university make a difference? “Absolutely,” Madeira says. “We have a moral obligation as a leader in practice, because the university consumes a lot of resources, and as a leader empowering future generations.” —Sally Acharya continued next page |
