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Vancouver Island is knows for its beer micro-breweries, with 17 places cooking up liquid gold. But a new kind of micro-brew is gaining popularity there: biodiesel. This story from Beacon News says a biodiesel cooperative at a farmer’s market is selling about 40,000-50,000 gallons of the green fuel each year.

As you walk into the Cowichan Biodiesel Cooperative’s processing facility in Duncan B.C., it really does look like a microbrewery. Tanks, pumps, hoses and other assorted machinery are all reminiscent of the brew master’s trade. But unlike the yeasty, worty smell that you get at a brewery the biodiesel processing facility has the faint hint of French fries.

“I got involved because I wanted to get off fossil fuels,” says Lynn Wytenbroek, a founding member.

The cooperative credits dedicated customers and a source of used vegetable oil from cruise ships and restaurants for a lot of its success. Plus, you gotta love the coop’s URL: www.smellbetter.org.

Many a turkey met a delectable fate yesterday as they were dipped in hot oil and fried up GBD – golden, brown and delicious. Well, you might want to add green to that equation, as the leftover fryer oil can be turned into biodiesel. Many cities and communities across the country are offering to take that used fryer oil off your hands and make it into the green fuel. In Chicago, that city’s newspaper, the Tribune, had this article about the recycling efforts there, which also keeps that unwanted grease out of the sewer system.

On Saturday, 19 suburbs in DuPage and Cook counties will collect used cooking oil to convert it to clean-burning biofuel. School & Community Assistance for Recycling & Composting Education, or SCARCE, a Glen Ellyn-based environmental education nonprofit, organized the collection with oil recyclers Green Grease Environmental and Chicago Biofuels…

Sometimes the buildup gets out of control, like when a 16-ton lump of congealed grease and oil was discovered in London’s sewers in July. According to a statement from Thames Water, the utility company that manages the sewers, the bus-sized lard blob, or “fatberg,” reduced the pipe to 5 percent of its normal capacity and could have flooded streets and homes with sewage.

While your town might not experience its own 16-ton “fatberg,” you’ve got a chance to give your waste grease new life as biodiesel. Check your local area to see who will be collecting or where you can drop it off.