PORTLAND – Two people from Unity College made a road trip by driving a modified pickup truck from New Orleans to Maine on $10 worth of diesel fuel and discarded vegetable oil collected from restaurants along the way.

Jason Reynolds, 27, and Sara Trunzo, 20, made the trip in a 1990 Dodge Ram equipped with a special vegetable oil fuel system consisting of tanks, filters and hoses that feed the engine with oil when the driver turns a switch.

During the trip, they stopped at restaurants and pumped grease into the 75-gallon tank mounted in the bed of the truck. They learned to avoid fast-food places and cheap restaurants because of the thick, chunky grease.

“You basically go behind every restaurant and, this was news to me, there are these grease traps” that hold all the waste oil used to cook meals, Reynolds said. “There’s often an open door to the kitchen, and you stick your head in and ask them if you can suck their grease.”

Reynolds, who is from Skowhegan, graduated from Unity last month. Trunzo, of Kinnelon, N.J., is pursuing a degree there.

After graduation, Reynolds picked up the truck in New Jersey and drove it to New Orleans, where Trunzo was repairing hurricane-damaged homes with a team of 12 Unity students and faculty. They then drove it back to Maine together.

The truck uses diesel fuel to start the engine, and switches to vegetable oil after the engine heats up. The engine sounds like a tank, but Trunzo and Reynolds said the exhaust looks and smells better than diesel fumes. They estimated the truck gets about 20 miles for every gallon of grease.

Reynolds and Trunzo are working on campus this summer, and they plan to keep the truck around to demonstrate the potential of alternative fuels.

They were pleased that restaurant owners and employees were interested in their truck when they asked for the discarded grease.