VancouverEcoTours was a demonstration project designed to fuel local tourism recycling waste products from restaurants. The main goals of the company were to create an entertaining and educational experience for visitors to Vancouver‘s north shore that help them to see the beauty of the pacific northwest in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way.
The company was built upon the principles that by finding out more information about your environment you can more responsibly and efficiently synchronize with your environment improving the quality of the life of everyone in it. One element of this idea was the way that we fuelled our operations…
We created public private partnership with many different government agencies non-government agencies and private enterprises in order to facilitate the utilization of a waste product into a beneficial resource that was environmentally friendly. VancouverEcoTours vehicles were fuelled using recycled cooking oil collected from local restaurants. Part of the tour was refuelling the vehicle using the used cooking oil that was collected from various locations on the tour route, being processed on site using TerraOil Technology. TerraOil (as well as VancouverEcoTours ) was an internal subsidiary of Green Cab Inc. TerraOil created systems for purifying used cooking oil for the purposes of fuelling the biodiesel industry. TerraOil systems were created in part through SRED (federal/provincial scientific research and development tax credits) additional cooperation with the NRC (national research council), and private funding through the principles, Eric and Yasuko (Otsuka) Williamson. The underlying concepts of converting the tour vehicles to run on used cooking oil, the tour company underneath it to highlight the utility of this reutilization of a waste product, the resultant priceless TV, press and media received-these were the brainchild of Eric Williamson. Critical support and strategic advice/planning was contributed by Yasuko (Otsuka) Williamson*. It should be noted that none of these projects would have been possible without the support, advice and collaborative strategizing of Yasuko (Otsuka) Williamson* * previously “Yasuko Williamson“, currently “Yasuko Otsuka”