13 Year Old Recycles Cooking Oil Into Heating Oil For The Needy

Two years ago, at only 11 years old, Cassandra Lin started TGIF: Turning Grease Into Fuel. She saw a need in her local community of Westerly, Rhode Island, and then found an ingenious way to solve it that benefitted not only the needy but the companies providing the cooking grease. She started by convincing her town council to set up a collection area for the grease. Then she convinced the local businesses and even residents to dump their cooking grease into the container, thus sparing a lot of clogged drains and unpleasant runoff. Once collected, the grease is refined and a portion of it goes to local charities to pass out among the needy as heating oil. The rest is turned into biodeisel and sold so that the town and companies still have incentive to donate.

Now, at age 13, Cassandra is collecting enough grease to turnout 30,000 gallons of bioediesel a year. That's $60,000 worth of fuel. Her work has become a formula that caught even the UN's attention and they invited Lin, along with 1400 other inovative children, to the UN Confrence on Sustainable Development. One can only hope that her work is taken to heart and repeated in towns all across America.