Sometime in the next decade, you may be able to say you're helping save the world by ordering some Szechuan beef from the Chinese place on the corner. BiOil, a biodiesel company in California, has plans to buy waste oil from fast-food restaurants and turn it into biodiesel fuel for vehicles. Biodiesel produces less carbon dioxide than regular diesel, though it's currently more expensive (and gets fewer miles per gallon). BiOil's ambitious — and expensive — plan would require a national network of disposal centers to collect a subtantial portion of the 3.9 billion gallons of waste vegetable oil produced by restaurants each year. Good luck with that, guys.

But if such a system would come to be, the situation would be pretty win-win-win, with waste being cut, a boatload of cleaner-burning diesel fuel being produced, and fast-food joints selling something they used to have to pay to get taken away. There is at least one downside, though: you might feel like it's your environmental responsibility to eat at Chipotle more than ever. — Peter Pachal

BiOil, via CNet