I kind of forgot in my post, that the point I was trying to make about 'heavy industrial' zoning in this town, was that the costs of renting a site zoned this way are far more expensive than the costs of rentring a light industrial site (I live (illegally) in what is actually a light-industrial zoned warehouse with a bunch of arty types and that kind of real estate is quite affordable for a small producer operation or any other small business). A 'heavy industrial' site is just completely out of the price range of a small producer just starting out, certainly out of the price range for say a volunteer-run user/producer coop .
Similarly it seems to me that the costs of insurance to cover either a small commercial producer operation or an amateur production co-op can be similarly prohibitive (we heard an estimate of 5,000 a year for insuring our amateur, all-volunteer coop, which is utterly, completely unaffordable for us, I don't have more firm figures than that yet) and on the biofuel list there was another small producer in Alabama who I believe was trying to make fuel for the local schools or something, who couldn't find anyone to insure his operation AT ALL- and this was a guy working in cooperation with his town's authorities, setting up a sanctioned, official program! Of course the Brits maybe have it worse with the 'red tape' involving biofuels- individual drivers occasionally post stuff on lists about how their equivalent of liability and collision insurance (in the US that's the auto insurance that pays you off in the event of an accident) can be canceled/claims not paid, if they turn out to be driving a car with an unreported SVO modification- like the fuel the car was running on has anything to do with their problems not keeping the car between the lines on the road!). anyway these are examples of ways that the cards are stacked against small producers (at least in some areas) and 'aboveboard' co-ops - that even without the major roadblock formerly caused by the NBB/EPA/health effects testing issue, there are all the obstacles that favor businesses with large amounts of investment and up-front capital to spend. One of the beauties of biodiesel production is that you can make it using '$10 of parts and a broken cultivator blade' as Keith and Ed pointed out. This should lead to someone being able to grow their own business from scratch, with fairly minimal capital to start- but as is often the case, the business world is weighted against businesses who operate on that kind of low-budget mentality or practice- hence the (I think) requirements that would have forced that other bulk buying coop to buy a brand-new expensive doublewalled (that's the part I'm not 100% sure about) fuel storage tank when they already had a free one that would've been perfectly legal on a farm three miles from their proposed city location... and of course all of those regulations (except the British auto insurance idiocy I mentioned) all are enacted with employee safety and public safety and human health in mind. 'They' no doubt would consider the heavy industrial zoning requirement in Oakland to be due to impact on neighborhoods and on the immediate environment (which in Oakland, like anywhere else seems to translate into 'it's OK to stick the really polluting industries in predominantly-people-of-color-populated areas'). That zoning doesn't consider the difference between the impact of a small-producer biodiesel operation employing two or four people (my friend's situation I believe) and a Chevron refinery. I'm not completely sure what 'the deal' was with the Alabama producer who couldn't find ANY insurance at all for his business (but I've heard similar insurance horror stories in other fields) but that's probably due to the conservative nature (and bloodsucking! there. I've said it) of the insurance business- you have to have it for many operations, but insurance companies legally aren't obligated to provide it to anyone they don't want to (except in some cases like auto where there's been some government intervention for this). A dead-end situation in many cases... mark [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Biofuels at Journey to Forever http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuel at WebConX http://webconx.green-trust.org/2000/biofuel/biofuel.htm List messages are archived at the Info-Archive at NNYTech: http://archive.nnytech.net/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
