Bob King worked on the diesel generators at Maui's central landfill and watched as truckloads of used cooking oil were dumped there each day. Rather than look the other way, King turned his attention to developing a way to recycle the oil and put an end to what he said was contamination of the island.

King, 50, "started looking around" and discovered something called biodiesel. He got together with a researcher at the University of Idaho to develop a process to convert the used cooking oil into diesel fuel, and in 1996 King and his wife, Kelly, launched Pacific Biodiesel in Kahului, the first retail biodiesel business in the country.

The idea was to collect used oil from Maui's businesses, turn it into diesel fuel and sell the product as an environmentally safe alternative to petroleum-based diesel. Like many new ventures, King's business began slowly as he had to convince diesel users that the fuel was safe to use in their trucks and engines.

Biodiesel was such a new concept that King was able to secure the Web address www.biodiesel.com for his business.

"I had no market and I had to build the plant, produce the fuel and then find people who wanted to use the fuel," King said. "In those early days I'd go and talk to a group of people and ask how many people had heard of biodiesel and if there was a hand that went up I would be surprised."

At the time, another hindrance was that King's diesel cost about 75 cents to $1 more per gallon than petroleum-based diesel on the island. But as King marketed his new product, customers began to embrace it.

King said it helped that he was a diesel mechanic and used the biodiesel in his own trucks and machines. If he used it in his equipment, customers figured, then it must be safe.

He also praised his early customer base because they were willing to take a chance on something new.

"A lot of our customers from the early days were pioneers themselves and were ready to try something else. It really touched their soul that they could get something besides petroleum in their vehicle," King said. "A lot of these families that we were selling fuel to had done a lot of other things in their life to get themselves in what they thought was a socially responsible position and they embraced it."

But the idea caught on because, King said, not only was he producing clean fuel, he also was solving the problem that faced restaurants and other businesses of what to do with their used oil. He estimates that about 250,000 gallons a year is brought to his Maui plant and that it represents 100 percent of all the used cooking oil that is properly disposed of on the island.

King said he gets a 90 percent yield from each gallon of oil and the byproduct, glycerin, is used to make boiler fuel or compost.

"Nothing goes into the landfill from our operation," he said. "So we've completely removed the product from the landfill."

Over the years, the price of petroleum diesel has leap-frogged the biodiesel and now costs about 50 cents more at the pump than his fuel. King said he's able to keep costs down because his primary source of oil is free.

Word of King's biodiesel plant spread and a year after he started producing fuel on Maui a Japanese businessman contracted King to build a facility for his KFC franchises in Nagano.

In 2000, King opened a plant in Honolulu that takes in about 900,000 gallons of used oil each year. The two Hawai'i facilities produce about 1 million gallons of biodiesel each year.

In all, Pacific Biodiesel manages 10 plants in Hawai'i and on the Mainland and King plans to open a new plant on the Big Island in the next year.

The cost to put up a plant varies because of land prices and the size of the facility, which could include a tank farm and retail pump station. Typically, he said, a biodiesel plant costs about $1 to $2 per gallon of annual production, so a million-gallon plant would run from $1 million to $2 million to build.

Although Pacific Biodiesel is growing, King said he's careful not to expand too fast.

"We're just really trying to focus on community-based production, so rather than building very large plants that ship product long distances, we're trying to build plants that are owned and operated and using materials from a very small area," King said. "We want to spend a lot more time and energy figuring out these local models where the community has at least some of their own energy within their own control, just like community-based food products."

Reach Curtis Lum at culum@honoluluadvertiser.com.