Researchers are running 10 BellSouth trucks using fuel made from recycled telephone directories, providing a new twist to the old ad slogan, "Let Your Fingers Do the Walking."
"Now, we've got the directory doing the driving," said Jan Rickey, a spokeswoman for the Florida Energy Office, which is sponsoring the research project with BellSouth Corp.BellSouth collected 58,000 tons of old phone books in its nine-state service area last year. That is enough to make 2.9 million gallons of fuel, said John Thomas, a researcher at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne.
Five pounds of wastepaper yields about a pint of the fuel, so one copy of the typical big-city Yellow Pages, at about 4.25 pounds each, would yield about a tenth of a gallon, enough fuel to take a truck about 1.5 miles.
The chemical is methyltetrahydrofuran, also known as MTHF. It is made by treating wastepaper with acid and steam, then adding hydrogen.
Researchers first began using the fuel in the early 1980s, when gasoline prices peaked, but dropped the idea when prices fell.
The technique has been revived because of increasing concern about recycling and clean air. The trucks running on the mixture of up to 24 percent MTHF have lower tailpipe emissions of hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide than those using gasoline alone.
Thomas plans to increase the mixture gradually to 80 pecent MTHF, measuring fuel mileage, performance and pollution at each step.
BellSouth spokesman Larry Stevens said the company previously used old phone directories as mulch for seedlings, as bedding for chickens and as raw material for factories that make egg cartons and toilet tissue, but continues to look for new uses.