Larry’s Beans, a fair trade coffee company in Raleigh, North Carolina, has gone biodiesel!
Larry, co-owner of Larry’s Beans, gave a lil space to Piedmont Biofuels to put in a biodiesel 100 station. The station sells Biodiesel 100, a 100% bio-brew made locally in Pittsboro, NC — and is a part of the NC B100 Trail, a network of biofueling stations across North Carolina.
The station’s dubbed Larry’s 1507, cuz Larry’s Beans is at 1507 Gavin St. :)
Apparently, some odd laws around biodiesel 100 requires that you be member of one of North Carolina’s biodiesel co-ops to actually buy the biodiesel. Still, it’ll be a nice boon for NCers.
The biodiesel station’s new, but Larry’s Beans has been running on grease for a while now — Since last year, the Larry’s Beans bus has been tooling around town, powered by straight veggie oil collected from local restaurants :)
How’d Larry get into grease-power? Well it did, in part, have to do with fair trade coffee. Larry sez he was once “just a coffee geek,” who chanced onto the fair trade movement through Cooperative Coffees. “That opened the doors to sustainability,” Larry says. “And once you get hooked to the sustainability continuum, you get addicted.”
Larry and I talked on the phone for a while about fair trade undies, coffee, and the Oxfam-Starbucks issue around Ethiopian coffee. More on all of that soon –
Biodiesel is way cool. I am in the process of building an appleseed biodiesel processor right now to power our 88 Ford pickup–soon to be our biodiesel Joebella Coffee delivery vehicle.
So yeah– what is up with countries of origin trademarking the names of their coffee regions? I don’t really understand all the implications or how it can benefit the country(Ethiopia).Looking forward to more input on this topic.
Comment by joebella — November 10, 2006 @ 4:50 pm
Wow! Good luck with the biodiesel processor!
I’ll write more soon about the Ethiopia and trademarking issue :) Should be able to talk to some more people about it tonight –
Comment by Siel — November 11, 2006 @ 4:43 pm