Maybe we should help the restaurants get reparations for public policies that made them have to pay to dispose of a fuel source that could have been taken advantage of long ago to help head off peak oil and set an example of less wastefulness. Just a thought. Happy day for giving thanks, Don At 01:41 PM 11/19/2007, you wrote: I went Thursday to hear a talk on international cooperation re climate change by a Dr. Alfred Fuchs, a German Green who is in this country to assume the lead in a Washington-based foundation on climate change. It was a fairly standard "got to do something about climate change" talk, except that he emphasized government policies that would bring market forces to bear on the problem, an emphasis one doesn't often hear from American Greens. He also focussed more than I am used to on soil degradation. At the reception afterward, I got talking to Olof Hansen of the EPA, who has been working with the city on the biofuels from waste fats and oils project. So I asked him our question about toxins in the portion of the raw material that they intend to scrape out of the sewers. He was rather nonplussed, then asked what kind of toxins I had in mind. Well, I wasn't sure either, so I said, "How about heavy metals?" He replied that in general that was not a major issue in SF, because we don't do much manufacturing. He went on to say that restaurant waste would constitute the vast majority of the raw material, to the tune of 10 million gallons of oil per year. And since restaurants usually pay to have the stuff hauled away, they are happy to donate it to the city. FYI Jeanne -- Jeanne Rosenmeier 415 751-0901 _______________________________________________ Sustainability mailing list Sustainability@sfgreens.org https://list.sfgreens.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainability Don Eichelberger DJ Fix Independent Productions Green Uprising Blog www.greenuprising.blogspot.com My You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctRp5rGJoUc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iySwwyZfDgE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r9rK8nPREA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5UbnJ0kUqo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SktIYTyC1U Donny Fix del.icio.us book marks http://del.icio.us/donnyfix The Hegelian/Marxist goal is emancipation. Marx said it best in 1843: "Human emancipation wll only be complete when the real, individual man (sic) is absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his every day life, in his work and in his relationships, he has become a species-being (politically accountabe to the whole); and when he recognizes and realizes his own power as social powers, so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power."