From Food To Fuel: Olive Oil Powers Pittsburgh Truck

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

December 6, 2012 | 11:49 AM

Is the next new fuel fad….olive oil? The organizers of a Pittsburgh-area effort aimed at collecting used oil from restaurants and turning it into biofuels hope so.
The Post-Gazette has the details on an olive and vegetable oil-fueled truck that’s driving from eatery to eatery in Oakland.

It’s GTECH Strategies’ alternative-energy vehicle in a pilot campaign to collect waste cooking oil in a concentrated area.
The project has nine Oakland restaurants contributing so far.
Ting Yen stores about 35 pounds of used oil a day in the basement of Sushi Fuku on Oakland Avenue, including contributions from the owner of Oishii Bento across the street. He had previously contracted with a private company that paid him for the oil but he liked GTECH’s local pitch.