Nip, Tuck… and Fill Up?
I’ve heard of people going to extremes to make biodiesel, but this story has to be the strangest thing I’ve heard in a while. A Beverly Hills doctor is currently under investigation because the fat he removed from his patients was allegedly used to fuel his Ford Explorer and his girlfriend’s Lincoln Navigator.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Craig Alan Bittner, who has since shut down his practice and moved to South America, said his patients wanted him to use their fat for fuel. “Not only do they get to lose their love handles or chubby belly,” wrote Dr. Bittner on the website lipodiesel.com (which has since been taken down), “but they also get to take part in saving the Earth.”
Most biofuel in the U.S. currently has beef tallow or pig lard mixed in with soybeans because the animal products are cheaper to add in than pricey soybeans. Animal (and, presumably, human) fat gets drivers the same amount of mileage as regular diesel, but it needs to be processed more than vegetable-based biofuel.
Besides the fact that using human fat for this purpose is a crime (under laws that probably few of us knew existed, using human medical waste to fuel cars is illegal in California), experiments such as these don’t exactly help the reputation of biofuels. And even if the thought of running your car on human flesh doesn’t creep/gross you out, I would venture to guess that it would have that effect on most people. Sorry, Tyler Durden. Back to the drawing board.
Meanwhile, it’s unclear what is going to happen to Dr. Bittner. He is currently volunteering at a clininc in South America, and he maintains that all of his liposuction procedures were performed without a “single serious complication or infection”. Some question whether he could have even done what he claimed to have done in the first place, since Lincoln Navigators don’t run on diesel…
Source: ecogeek
