Vegetable oil is helping Bedford council cut its carbon footprint

Monday’s Climate Change Committee (September 23) was told that the current HVO trial focuses on the refuse collection vehicle fleet as these vehicles produce the “majority” of the CO2 released by the council’s fleet.

Paul Pace, chief officer (environment) told the committee that HVO vehicles have a “low upfront cost” when compared with electric (EVs) or hydrogen powered vehicles.

“HVO is a high quality fuel produced from vegetable oil or animal fat and it’s basically converted into liquid fuel by hydro treatment.

“There’s very little infrastructure we need to change at the depot in relation to running vehicles on HVO.

“And the HVO is a fuel that has up to 90 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions.

“It’s 100 per cent biodegradable and it’s literally a drop in replacement for regular diesel,” he said.

Councillor Hilde Hendrickx (Lib Dems, Riverfield) was concerned about the supply of HVO.

“Some may come from genuine waste like fish and chip shops etc, but there’s a growing demand for HVO.

“There’s an increase in palm oil derived HVO, which actually contributes to deforestation in South-East Asia, for example.

“There are doubts about whether this is a sustainable solution.

“It can only ever be a transitional measure, and the really sustainable solution is to move to electric refuse collection vehicles and more and more are coming to the market,” she said.

Mr Pace said: “We’ve tested electric refuse collection vehicles, they’re not really suitable.

“They haven’t got the range that we need to do the collections across the borough.

“It’s okay if you’re in a city or something like that and you’ve got a short collection route, but not in our villages.

“We’d need to significantly increase the fleet… to make sure we got the collections in,” he said.

“An electric vehicle is nearly twice as much as a normal vehicle at the moment,” he added.

“Whilst we’re not got the infrastructure and things in place we can’t afford to spend the amounts of taxpayers money on something that wouldn’t work for this council at this time,” he said.