Staff at Moray Council have revealed a novel new recycling initiative - by converting a refuse lorry to run on used cooking oil collected from schools.

The staff at the Ashgrove maintenance depot in Elgin took unwanted components, including those from a redundant domestic heating system culled from a council house, to convert the lorry.

"Once we had converted the van we understood the principles involved in converting from diesel to cooking oil and we set about designing the truck kit from scratch," said vehicle services officer John Pearson.

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"The main part - the all-important heat exchanger - came from a domestic heating system from our own housing section which would otherwise have been dumped. Other parts came from a decommissioned vehicle."

School kitchens in Moray use around 200 litres of cooking oil every month and the waste was previously taken south by road tanker for reprocessing along with oil from schools and restaurants throughout the north and north-east.

Now the oil from Moray's schools is collected and put through a filtration system - also designed and assembled by staff at the Ashgrove depot - before being used as vehicle fuel.

According to staff using the vehicles, the performance is unaffected while early results have demonstrated that fuel consumption is on a par with diesel.

Councillor John Russell, chairman of Moray Council's economic development and infrastructure services committee, welcomed the latest contribution to the authority's efforts at carbon reduction.

He also commended the fleet maintenance staff on their initiative and skills in developing an in-house fuel conversion system.

(NS/JM)