Amaro: What is the new biodiesel program offered at Newton North?
Chinosi: What we’ve done over the last two years is essentially create this biodiesel program, which takes the cafeteria grease from North and South and turns it into burnable fuel. We can burn it in any diesel engine and in any oil-heating furnace. You can heat your home with it or drive your car. I drive my car with recycled grease.
Amaro: How do you collect the grease from the cafeteria?
Chinosi: We literally walk over and grab it. They put it in a 5-gallon bucket for us and we grab it.
Amaro: It’s just from cooking?
Chinosi: Yes. It’s from the French fries we eat here—
Amaro: —you collect the grease—
Chinosi: —and we turn the grease into fuel.
Amaro: How much have you collected so far?
Chinosi: Our rough numbers are, between the two schools, maybe about 150 gallons a year.
Amaro: How far would 150 gallons of fuel power the average diesel engine car?
Chinosi: With 15 gallons in my Jetta Volkswagen, I can drive 600 miles. When I make it from my own sources, separate from the school, it costs about a dollar to make. I only pay a dollar for my gallon of gas, instead of $2.70 or more.
Amaro: What is the class called?
Chinosi: The program is called Greengineering. So this year is biodiesel, and each year we’re going to add a new course. We’ll have solar and wind, and geothermal, and hydroelectricity; we’ll look at all alternative energy as the bigger picture, and all of the components for that.
Amaro: Where is the class held?
Chinosi: For this year the old electrical shop is now the Greengineering shop. In the new building, there is a Greengineering lab, so that’s pretty exciting. We do our chemistry work right here in our kind of makeshift lab.
Amaro: How long is the process of turning grease into usable fuel?
Chinosi: The whole process with the machines we use is about 24 hours. We can turn 40 gallons of grease into burnable fuel in 24 hours.
Amaro: What is the course description for the class?
Chinosi: The idea is that we’re setting up the whole thing as a corporation. You know, theoretical and real. Like the Tigers’ Loft is a viable business, right?
Amaro: Right, they make money and sell food…
Chinosi: Yes, right, well our job, hopefully, if we do it right, will be to create a corporation for Tiger fuel. We have a raw product, a manufacturing process, and we have customers. And there are teachers, including myself, who drive diesel, and we’ll be the first customers. There are also plans to put it in a snowplow, one of the big trucks in the city, or use some of it to offset the heating oil. Now, we don’t have access to enough to make a real dent commercially now. So we have only 150 gallons…Well, a few cars using the fuel we have now for a year is all we can provide. So we don’t have the raw material yet to make more.
Amaro: But it’s the start. And you’re teaching students how to actually go through the process.
Chinosi: Yes, it’s the beginning. I wrote a grant for the Newton Schools Foundation; they were phenomenal. They gave us a lot of money, and that really got us to that place where I could use the two years, I could buy some stuff, really experiment, bring other teachers in to help. We had a whole team of people involved, and everyone could slowly get a handle on, “What does this really mean? How will it work with the students?” It’s really just broken down to a big vision: the curriculum, schools who are already doing similar things, and the technical information.
Amaro: What are some components offered to students?
Chinosi: Right now it’s just a four-block class, under the guides of Career and Tech Ed. The cool thing about it is that it is unlike any other course, in the sense that we’ve taken out the specific content. This is not a chemistry class, this isn’t an engineering class, this isn’t a hands-on electrical class, it’s all of those things. It’s also economics, entrepreneurship—we’re setting it up as a company. This team is the board of executives; we have to learn every aspect. In the class, students’ natural inclinations guide them.
Amaro: So in a sense it offers a real world aspect, it gives you everything. Students who may not necessarily be talented in science class can come anyway; maybe they’re interested in mathematics, or customer service, or just helping the planet.
Chinosi: Yes, in the first few days we heard a lot of people with very different reasons, I’m here for an environmental reason; I’m here because I want to work with machines; I’m here because I like chemistry; I’m here for economics. It’s all here. It’s going to be an issues class, where we focus on this one issue, a notion of energy in the fuel form, and expand later. I believe that high school kids are more prepared and more ready than we ever thought.

This post is tagged Emily Amaro