The story of our company’s founding, to where we are now, is a narrative of curiosity complemented by idealism. We were curious about the concept of waste oil and how it could power machinery. And idealistic enough to believe that total dependence on refined hydrocarbon products was not good for our economic security or for the air we breathe.

We started small, but our business model was an idea whose time had come. With some hard work and good fortune, today we’ve grown into a company serving customers in four states. We have not lost sight of our idealism. As we grow in size we are more determined than ever to cling to those ideals. They guide everything about our company — every process, every decision.

We were determined to carve out a new definition and standard of service, and we’ve done that.

We vowed to treat employees, customers and business partners with nothing but the utmost respect, and we’ve done that.

And finally, we wanted to make a difference in the way people think about recycling and the future of our planet. We’ve got a good start on that, but still have plenty of work left to do.

Though domestic exploration and drilling are at an all-time high, and the U.S. produces 40 percent of the oil it consumes, our reliance on foreign sources of oil drains dollars from our economy and fills the treasuries of foreign countries.

More exploring and drilling for domestic oil may seem like a simple solution. But as we’ve seen there are risks to the environment in drilling — just as there are in burning ever-greater quantities of hydrocarbons that spew harmful pollutants into the air.

As of the end of 2011, biodiesel operations across the U.S were producing nearly a billion gallons of clean-burning, renewable fuel. That is a small dent in overall fuel consumption in the U.S. but consider this: Once a gallon of hydrocarbon fuel is drilled and consumed, whether from overseas or here at home, it’s gone.

Biodiesel, on the other hand, can come from a variety of sources…and it’s renewable. We can always produce more.

The founders of Waste Oil Recyclers have extensive backgrounds in the food service industry. We’ve seen the business through the eyes of our customers, which means we know how slim the margins can be and that there is no room for wasted time or unproductive effort.

Those are reasons why we were so painstaking in building the WOR model of service. We wanted to ensure that recycling your waste oil through our system was as clean, efficient and productive as it could possibly be. Your time, effort and attention are better spent on other priorities.

Your patrons — people in general — are increasingly aware of environmental issues and businesses that play visible roles in green issues.

Many of our customers are pleasantly surprised, even delighted, when they learn they’ll make money from something they used to throw away.

The story of how that has come to pass is very simple. The concept of burning vegetable oil (biodiesel) in diesel engines has been around since at least 1900. But through the decades biodiesel mostly took a back seat to diesel fuel refined from hydrocarbon-based oil, not least because hydrocarbon-based oil was cheap and plentiful.

Through time, the relationship between hydrocarbon-based oil and biodiesel has been based on price and availability. In the 1980s, for instance, when global crude oil prices dropped to as low as $10 a barrel, interest in biodiesel as a fuel virtually disappeared.

Fast forward to the early and mid-2000s. Not only had crude oil prices climbed dramatically, they were also volatile and unpredictable. What’s more, people by that time were also much more attuned to the issues of air quality and the effects fossil fuel emissions were having on our climate. Renewed interest in biodiesel grew in direct proportion to crude oil prices and increasing environmental concerns.