>To: biofuel@yahoogroups.com
>From: "girl_mark_fire" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 08:36:18 -0000
>Subject: [biofuel] long post- the Grease Trap: Co-ops part 1
>
>Well, Jack asked a big question about co-ops, and I feel a little overwhelmed
>trying to answer it.
>
>the biodiesel co-op 'movement' is growing very rapidly, I keep hearing about
>people wanting to start these things all over the place.
>
>Ive been in three of them now I guess. One is a year and a half old
>(Berkeley.) One (Tucson) was just starting, I was the most experienced
>member, and it kind of dissolved when I got severely chronically ill
>and had to
>leave town and hightail it back to berkeley to be a gimp (and half the 4
>members had phone and no email and the other half had email and no
>phones, and couldn't really deal with coordinating). The third one
>of these 'co-
>ops' I'm involved in is this Team Canola thing, but we're all
>refugees from our
>berkeley model and are therefore pretty allergic to being named a coop.
>Team Canola calls ourselves a "cell" (yeah, that name brings up really
>negative reactions for some people)- four or so people, the cell makes fuel to
>fuel our four vehicles, a host 'green business' whose site we are
>using, and a
>spouse or two's vehicles. Or that's the theory anyway.
>
>there are a number of things people mean when they talk about 'co-op', and
>VERy different ways of organizing it, and very different goals and communities
>(geographically) that can be supported by a co-op. Like everything else in
>biodiesel, there are simply a million different ways of accomplishing the same
>goal- fuel- and some are more appropriate and some are less, to different
>individuals' needs.
>
>1. One model is what I call the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)
>model, in which a couple of guys make fuel for several subscribers . I suspect
>that this is a better way to go than some other models because you can really
>control safety and quality control easily if there's only a few highly trained
>people working. The Corvallis, OR 'Greaseworks' co=op seems to be
>organized this way. I believe they make fuel on site and also sell
>filtered SVO,
>and maybe commercial biodiesel as well???? Take a look at their website, I
>have no direct experience with those folks (I think it's grease-works.com or
>something like that, do a search).
>
>2. Another model is the bulk buy type of co-op- and I really recommend doing
>this, at least for starters, to take the fuel-needs pressure off of
>a fuelmaking co-
>op, though it takes a good amount of work as well. I think that various people
>have tried this bulk buy model with good success, it's much nicer to
>fuel out of
>a drum at your friend's house than to go to a gas station, and in some areas
>this might be your only option for finding commercial biodiesel.
> You get together interested consumers, find a distributor who;ll
>deliver to your
>area, find a site for a tank, and get commercial fuel delivered in drums or
>pumped into the big tank. Ways to organize this include running a more
>central distribution point where everybody comes to get their car
>fueltank filled
>(not recommended by me from what I've heard about the impact of everybody
>coming to one central location for a tankful of fuel) or the
>opposite, trying to
>make all members take their fuel home in drums once it's delivered by the
>distributor. OUr Berkeley coop has recently started doing bulk buy, and it
>really is a tremendous amount of work coordinating all the orders and
>deliveries, so definitely take that into account. The decentralized
>distribution
>minimises the impact of a lot of traffic. IN our case we're in a
>city and have a
>lot of members who don' t have space at home to put a drum of fuel, so one
>very, very positive contribution of the 'co-op' aspect is that it
>connects those
>with no space with others who can host a drum of fuel- we are trying to have
>three or so people at each site I think, and to minimise the impact on the
>neighbors we also bulk buy fuel cans (a pallet load at a time) and some sites
>ask members to dispense their fuel into cans instead of into their
>car, and ask
>them to take the stuff away from the site before pouring it into the
>tank. Inour
>model, bulk buy is also decentralized and site coordinators and their drum-
>share people all decide how they want to run it and how much they want to
>spend on pumps and dispensing equipment.
>We started talking about the limits of this, and are trying to
>figure out the limits
>of how many people we can do this with before the coordinating gets out of
>hand. So far we buy something like 1000 gallons a month with 12 or so
>people and one high-fuel-use business participating. Did I mention
>that it is is
>a LOT of work to organize?
>
>3. A third model is the 'everybody gets trained to make fuel on a volunteer
>basis' model. It seems to me that this usually comes with all this
>rhetoric about
>'empowering people'., If you have any thoughts whatsoever that involve doing
>this with more than 5 people at a single site, think twice!
>DANGER!!!!!! read on.
>
>This is the model that many other groups seem to be trying to put together,
>and the model that the Berkeley Co-op tried and tried and tried to make work,
>and I have a lot of bad things to say about it if there's more than 5 people
>involved at one central location. The things that work against it
>are all the time
>involved in coordinating people, and the learning curve of biodiesel
>homebrewing. That learning curve isn't a problem in your own backyard on
>your own time, and a five-person coop is a small enough group that people all
>get enough exposure to the equipment and the process that they should be
>able to get over the learning curve fairly quickly. But many people, Berkeley
>included, get (or got) carried away in my opinion, wanting to please
>everybody and making some assumptions that were not so obviously flawed,
>and tried to make a big public single-facility fuelmaking operation.
>
>Here's one issue: time.
> I have some flyers about biodiesel making that I take to fairs,
>which talk about
>the process and answer some FAQ's. On one of the FAQ's I claim that it takes
>three hours of attended labor to make and wash a (55, 100, or 150 gallon)
>batch- 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, with lots of unattended settling/
>heating/agitating time in between when you don' t need to do any actual work.
>
> This is all well and good in your own back yard- in fact I'm
>writing this tome
>while some vegoil heats in my backyard and some "methoxide the easy way"
>sits and dissolves, so I can make the second set of batches for the night, and
>it's all nice and convenient since I am at home and get to hang out on the
>internet with y'all while I'm actually "making fuel"- it's not work.
>
>But one of my Berkeley co-op mates, wash coordinator Jennifer Radtke, saw
>that three-hour figure on my FAQ sheet and started joking that I should have
>amended it for "all the people who were coming up to us at the fair
>and telling
>us that they wanted to start a coop"- and that the figure should instead have
>read:
>"3 hours per batch if you're a single person, 10 hours per batch if
>you're five
>people, 30 hours labor if you're 15 people, etc". While she was joking, those
>were actually very, very accurate figures in our experience. Unless you're a
>co-op of people who live in the same immediate neighborhood, traveling to a
>central location to make fuel takes time, you can't just go about your home
>business while all that 'unattended' part of the process goes on, and the
>coordinating work of figuring out who does what when takes an immense
>amount of time. Back when the Berkeley co-op was still trying to meet
>members fuelmaking needs by homebrewing instead of bulk buying (brewing
>on a volunteer basis by the way, there's 'no money' in this to make
>it viable in
>the US to pay members to make fuel that competes with $1.80 a gallon
>petrodiesel!)- I was a nervous wreck, we were making only four to six batches
>a month at the co-op but it somehow took up 30 on-site hours per month of
>MY time alone, not to mention the hours put in by all the other
>volunteers, and
>another 25 on-site hours per month put in by Jennifer, and all this not
>counting meeting time and time spent on the phone and on email
>communicating with people - just for the purpose of making the same amount
>of fuel that one can make in a week in a home situation.
>
> For four to six batches of fuel, with oil collections not being a
>part of that work,
>that's absolutely obscene. Half of the hassle was the learning curve- with a
>huge number of peple, it's hard to train everybody al at once, since they;'re
>rarely there all together, so no one sees everything in the process very
>frequently and there are perpetually a large number of people at a different
>point in the learning process. this could be solved with a training program
>(you'd better think about paying the trainers, it;s a lot of work)
>The other thing that makes it a lot of work in a group setting, is
>that it's a
>complex technical process, and we all spent a huge amount of time simply on
>coordinating schedules with other volunteers, sitting in meetings, training
>people, sitting in meetings, making sure no one is crossthreading plumbing
>every time they attached a hose to the pump, sitting in meetings, writing up
>pleas for volunteers on our email list, calling and emailing people
>to schedule
>emergency meetings and workdays when something went wrong, and other
>stuff completely peripheral to the actual work of fuelmaking. I used to have
>nightmares where all that scared me was that I was writing an endless email
>to the co-op email list. I swear.
>
>The story actually ended well- we had a big shakeup in Febuary, partly
>getting uglyish and involving the Burnveggies copmmunity- the regional
>California biodiesel listserve- (I really wanted to warn other groups who were
>trying to do the same thing based on our example) We restructured and are
>now running an awesome training program, have decided as a group that we
>REALLY want 'decentralization' and autonomy of small subgroups ('cells' or
>affinity groups) as our approach, figured out a process for larger changes
>(visioning meetings/dinners every six weeks where we talk about direction
>and vision and larger goals), spun off an advocacy/activist arm to do
>consumer education in our area, and decided NOT to focus on fuelmaking at
>a central site other than as a training tool. MOre on that later sometime. But
>the shakeup and restructuring took a year to happen, during which a lot of
>people's time just sort of got evaporated by the misguided attempt at
>'empowering people through democratic group fuelmaking' and similar
>nonsense that didn't take enough reality into account..
>
>There are some factors fairly specific to our individual situation
>that infuenced
>what we were doing wrong, but I think that there were some very basic
>assumptions we made that led to this obsene time-eating going on.
>
> I also think that some of these assumptions are pretty universal to many
>people trying to start biodiesel co-ops, that these assumptions seem to make
>sense at first, and that the flaws with them are not apparent until youve
>actually done this in a group.,I've heard of a lot of similar
>frustration in other
>biodiesel co-op groups I've heard about, so I think it needs to be
>figured out.
>
>Our situation: 1. an assumption that we can take anybody and make fuel with
>them and that 2. this would be an economical thing for us, money (cheap fuel)
>and timewise and 3. many members didn't want a cap on membership with
>the rather flimsy excuse that 'we might be shutting out the perfect member'
>which I suspect was more of an ego thing of some sort, wanting to have a
>great big public organization cause that looks good or something. In Northern
>California there is a HUGE demand for biodiesel, and we had a hard time
>getting around to deciding that we can sometimes just say NO to being 'all
>things to all people". So we had wayyy too many people trying (not very
>often) to make fuel, and no set program for training them properly , and a few
>other really bad structures. The sick thing is I see a lot of other
>groups doing
>the same exact thing- hearing about the idea of co-ops, not hearing enough of
>the details, being in an area where there is huge demand and interest, and
>not seeing that this (homebrewing) is inherently a limited-numbers activity.
>
>One assumption of the universal variety, is that people assume that
>if it takes
>a certain amount of time to make fuel, they think that it'll take
>less time if there
>are a lot of people to divide up the labor. It's a flawed assumption
>if you don't
>limit the numbers of people involved- there's simply not all that
>much unskilled
>labor involved. there's not much buckethauling, it's mostly skilled work,
>limited by the high initial learning curve involved.
>
> Even if you have 15 people who are all very well trained in homebrewing,
>there are very many different ways of doing everything and you will
>most likely
>spend a lot of time in meetings, coordinating and planning which route to take
>for various decisions. For instance we had some problem oil that was hard to
>get good conversion with, and just troubleshooting with a group of people and
>deciding on what to do about it, which was hard enough with five skilled
>people, would take a painful amount of time to coordinate in a large group.
>
>We eventually decided at my instigation to break up the fuelmaking part of the
>co-op into decentralized 'cells'. These dont exist yet, so all this
>is theoretical-
>we are currently running a three-month internship and the idea is that at the
>end of the internship we'll spin off some of the members/interns into these
>cells with equipment they'll have built in the class ( It's really
>fun, and the
>class takes place all over town at all the students' houses, this week's pre-
>class homework was to meet Jennifer in the plumbing aisle of the hardware
>store and learn about plumbing parts you need for the equipment they'll be
>building this weekend, last week's homework was to buy all the 'tailgate
>titration' gear, the following week's homework will be to make and bring liter
>batches to the quality testing class).
>
>4) another untested model:
>Team Canola and business/homebrewer 'cells':
>
>During the big shakeup me and some of the other more active fuelmaking
>members got an offer to set up a site at a business facility- the
>(small)business
>wanted to make their own fuel, but realistically didn't have the time to put
>themselves through the learning curve required. So as Team Canola we're
>starting to set up what I think is yet another model- a small group
>(like in the
>CSA model) of volunteers who partner with a business (farms come to mind
>as good ones to do this with, I really want to see this work for farmers fuel
>needs) to make fuel. The business is providing us with space (which is a
>premium thing in our urban area), occasional use of their large
>truck for large
>oil pickups, and some capital (a few hundred dollars) which is going to net
>them some fuel (one big batch a month should meet their needs) at cost
>(chemical costs, we are not counting labor- it came to .43 cents a gallon at
>once point, just a little more now that methanol costs more). We provide
>expertise and labor, and also pay some of the equipment costs ourselves,
>just like any other coop.
>
>This model differs from the CSA-style model just a little. Like the CSA folks,
>who are supported by subscribers and therefore have to deliver what they
>promise, we are trying to run a pro operation- we are three experienced
>people with one or two apprentices in the group of four or five, and I dont
>recommend starting something like this, where a business or a farmer
>depends on you, if you're new to fuelmaking, and don't have enough
>experience to be able to predict the work involved for each task.
>
>But unlike the CSA, we are volunteers. We are not getting paid by either the
>business or by subscribers- we're somewhere between the CSA style folks
>and the general-membership Berkeley -style coop. The reward for us is 1.
>space, 2. theoretically fancy equipment due to the businesses' small capital
>input 3. it's a homebrew research facility for me and Jennifer at
>least. We;'re
>nerds, and this is a big old biodiesel playground.
>
>What interests me so much in seeing if such a model will work, is the
>following:
>it takes three hours attended labor to make and wash a batch, and some of
>the unattended tasks (heating, filling, more) can be automated. The work is
>easy, especially if you already produce oil crops, are in the fast
>food business,
>have an active large cafeteria in your building, and/or have some other easy
>way to get oil without spending too much time on WVO collections.
>
> This three hours should be more or less the same amount of labor for a 150
>gallon batch as for a 55 gallon one, with the heating times varying of course.
>Anyway, I';m convinced that there will always be people for whom the three
>hours balanced, against 45 or 50 cents a gallon in a big batch, becomes an
>attractive enough proposition, that they won't worry about the 'costs' of the
>labor.
>
>Some people take the attitude that homebrewers are just a marginal
>transitional phase before commercial BD industry matures., but I';m
>pretty sure
>that even when we have cheap commercial fuel in this area, this type of on-
>site homebrew will have a place in our communities. A restaurant owner
>whose fast food joint produces a lot of WVO, a farmer growing oilseed, people
>in ethanol country with waste corn oil as an optional waste coproduct... seems
>to me that there are a lot of niche possibilities where if you can provide a
>business/farm with a way to avoid the learning curve.
> It's the learning curve involved that can take up a lot of time.
>It seems to me
>that partnering a small group of experienced volunteers with a business that
>has modest fuel needs should be one interesting way to get the business/
>farmer fueled without dealing with the learning curve, and provide both sides
>with something they need to have a decent micro-plant going..
>
>anyway, some of this is just theory- I keep saying that, and trying
>to stress the
>"SHOULDS" in here, because it's so important to keep a realistic
>view of it all,
>and we have only started working at our site. Amongst ourselves, Team
>Canola stressed two contradictory things in our organizing: trying to do some
>realistic planning of the physical aspect of it (which wasn't hard due to the
>experience level), and yet trying NOT to over-plan and micromanage
>everything, since we really don' tknow how this is realistically
>going to work.
>We're trying very hard to stay flexible, and that's not difficult
>with four or five
>people, and very hard with 15!
>
>. The fuelmaking coop in Portland, which has been having meetings for
>EIGHT MONTHS now without having made any fuel yet as a group, was
>recently in the news up there saying that they'll make fuel available all over
>portland for something like 77 cents a gallon plus a $50 onetime membership
>fee- 77 cents being the costs of chem and taxes (OK, I hope I'm not spreading
>a rumor, it was posted on the Yahoo Biodiesel list). When I heard that one I
>laughed so hard that biodiesel came out of my nose. I really should stay away
>from drinking biodiesel! Anyway that's one example of the crazy assumptions
>that people make, going into organizing the fuelmaking types of coops-
>they're missing a very large part of the realistic picture of how
>this actually
>works but they seem to be overexcited about the possibilities. Before
>anyone's made any fuel, someone';s making a big stink in the paper about it
>and they're doing more and more recruiting, and one of the guys periodically
>writes me asking about our Berkeley by-laws and legal stuff and says he
>wants to write a manual on 'how to start a co-op' Not having made fuel as a
>co-op yet.
> I laughed because I know how non-rewarding it is to make fuel on a
>volunteer basis in a large fuelmaking coop- after the initial glow
>of Biodiesel
>and What It Means To Me wears off, it's still a fairly boring and greasy and
>dirty task, and with a large group it is hard to make it fuel-wise
>rewarding, -
>and they;'re not alone in making great big huge assumptions that ignore the
>labor, without limiting the demand, or seemingly thinking through all the very
>real limitations of such a volunteer venture....
>
>arright, climbing down off the soapbox, more coming up eventually.
>
>girl mark
>
>PS we apparently have 100 people interested in the next internship, and 12
>slots in the next one, so there probably aren't any openings... sorry!
>Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 09:09:15 -0000
>Subject: [biofuel] another thing... was The Grease Trap: Co-ops part 1
>
>I just realized that it sounds really mean for me to a) talk about how the
>Portland coop is recruiting and talking to reporters, without having actually
>made fuel yet, and tob) at the same time be tooting my own horn on a list
>about the grand plans of Team Canola, who hasn't made fuel at it's business
>site either.
>
>The missing difference is that as a 'coop' we actually have been making drum
>batches (in my backyard) as part of our 'keep it realistic, keep it rewarding'
>approach- so that those in the group who are 'waiting' for the site to get
>operational, are at least getting fuel in the process and don' t
>burn out... . We
>took a couple of months of sporadic workdays to build the processor, these
>usually involved the sacred mission to Keep the Co-op Work Fun (meaning
>we incorporate barbeque-ing into the equipment workday or fuelmaking
>party). We've also tried hard to make sure that our members fueling needs are
>partly or fully met while they work on building equipment- so it's not just 8
>months of work and meetings and nobiodiesel. (berkeley had a massive 'no
>reward' problem for a while, you never knew if doing workdays was going to
>result in you actually getting any fuel since so little of the stuff
>was actually
>being produced for all the man-hours) Having seen a lot of burnout in coops,
>we've tried hard to keep the 'reward-to-work' ratio high during the equipment
>building and design phase, and I strongly suggest anyone organizing one of
>these volunteer groups keep this value very high. Bulk buy take some of the
>'reward' pressure off the homebrew end of a coop operation. People who get
>a diesel and can't find biodiesel and are waiting for a coop to get it's act
>together tend to be very antsy about production and availability!
>
>mark
>Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 09:36:42 -0000
>Subject: [biofuel] more positive next time was the Grease Trap: Co-ops part 1
>Reply-To: biofuel@yahoogroups.com
>
>I've got a decent list written up of things that HAVE worked well at
>the berkeley
>co-op, and I will try and write it up as a counter to the rather
>negative post I put
>out. It's really a very big deal to me that information about how these things
>have worked, and have not worked, be made available, since I seem to see
>so many of the "what has not worked" ones getting repeated by others starting
>these co-ops...
>marl
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