The Big Green Bus, an environmental project by 12 Dartmouth College students, made stops Monday in Ephrata and Lancaster city.

The students, who hail from Lancaster, Virginia, Michigan, California, Colorado, Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts, are winding up a 10-week tour that has taken them from their New Hampshire campus to Seattle, Los Angeles, Colorado, St. Louis and Atlanta.

They're now heading home, with a planned stop in New York City for a Wednesday appearance on "Good Morning, America."

"We've been driving around the country for the past eight weeks, talking to people about how (the bus) works and also about alternative fuels," said Michael Saladik, a 2002 McCaskey High School graduate who is the bus' principal driver.

The bus was parked at Saladik's home in Lancaster over the weekend, and he and his fellow eco-travelers took in a Barnstormers game Sunday.

On Monday, the bus made stops at Ephrata Public Library and on Race Avenue.

Nine of the 12 students, including Saladik, graduated in June from Dartmouth; two are sophomores soon heading back to class; and one is in his second year of medical school.

Saladik, 22, said he and his friends got involved after a similar bus based at Dartmouth hit the road last year.

"We saw how much fun they had and how successful they were," he said.

Working with the school, they raised money to replace that bus with a newer, used diesel-powered school bus. They painted the bus green and converted it to run on both diesel fuel and vegetable oil.

Because veggie oil is thicker than diesel, it must be heated and thinned before it can be pumped into the engine.

"The entire diesel system is still in the bus, but we split that off and use engine coolant after it goes through the engine," Saladik said. "We reroute that and radiate the heat from the coolant into the vegetable oil."

The bus starts off running on diesel fuel. After five minutes or so, students flip a switch, and the engine switches to vegetable oil.

Fuel mileage, he said, is roughly the same as with diesel fuel, about 8 to 9 mpg.

The bus is equipped with sofas and bunk beds, and the students sleep onboard or at the homes of family members or friends.

Students obtained sponsors, including Newman's Own Foods, to pay traveling expenses for the cross-country trek.

The bus is refueled as needed, said Elliott May of Ann Arbor, Mich., usually by "pulling off the highway wherever there are five or six restaurants."

Using an on-board pumping system to filter out impurities in the oil, they fill up the bus' 120-gallon tank.

Saladik said getting fuel is seldom a problem.

"We can't get it from a place like McDonalds because they go through so much, and they have people who buy it from them," Saladik said.

"But smaller mom-and-pop places and chains like Dennys and Applebees are paying someone to come in and take their waste vegetable oil weekly or bi-weekly, so for the most part, they are happy to give it to us."

The students realize switching vehicles to vegetable oil, which can be burned only in modified diesel engines, is not the sole solution to America's thirst for fuel, but it is one way to cut demand for oil.

Another is solar power. The bus has a roof-mounted solar panel that provides power for electric items onboard, such as computers and a television set.

"We're using this bus as something to catch people's eye and start a dialogue about alternative fuels in general," Saladik said.

The students' message is informal; they mainly answer questions and explain what they're doing and why.

The bus attracted the attention of the Weather Channel, which dispatched a film crew to travel briefly with the bus for a new show called "The Climate Code" that debuts in October.

But now, the trip is nearly over, and the bus is headed back to New Hampshire. Owned and insured by Dartmouth, the bus will stay at the college. Perhaps next year, it will hit the road again with a new crew of students.

"We'd love to see it as a sustainable project," Saladik said.

As for this year's trip, Saladik said it was "a blast" and an eye-opening experience.

"This is something we all feel strongly about," he said. "We're coming to an important time when we really need to start thinking about how we're going to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.

"And with gas prices so high, people are starting to think about the issue rather than letting it go in one ear and out the other."

The two students returning to Dartmouth in the fall may get back on the bus next summer.

"The rest of us have to try to figure out what we're going to do with the rest of our lives," Saladik said. blog comments powered by Disqus