In 2007, while travelling through Mali, Andy Pag had an epiphany. An overland expedition enthusiast and former journalist, Pag observed that the Malians were completely at the mercy of diesel prices and decided: “I didn’t want to carry on driving round the world exploring it unless I could do it sustainably... It would be so ridiculous to explore the world and try and understand it if you’re polluting it, creating carbon emissions that are helping destroy it.”

Prior to 2007, Pag admits, he’d had no particular interest in the environment, but his revelation has resulted in several increasingly high-profile expeditions highlighting environmental issues. That year, Pag drove a lorry powered by cocoa factory waste to Timbuktu, and in 2008, he organised the ‘Grease to Greece’ rally, which saw 10 cars drive from London to Athens on scavenged used cooking oil. It was during this journey that Pag was inspired to embark on his current, worldwide expedition: “I thought ‘Well, we’ve made it this far and we could quite easily go to Istanbul and make it to Asia and I wonder if we could go beyond.’”

During a brief stop in London, following two years traversing Europe, Asia and America, Pag tells me how the Biotruck Expedition was born with the aim of driving around the world on rubbish and, in fact, in rubbish. He describes the process of creating his vehicle from waste materials: “The bus itself was in a scrapyard and was quite rusty so there was quite a lot of welding that needed doing, and where possible we salvaged scraps of metal rather than use new metal. And then I took out all the seats inside and built a table and chairs which folds down into a second bed, a kitchen cabinet area, a shower area and a bed, all with recycled material that I found lying around the neighbourhood. A few years ago lots of people had plenty of money to restore their houses so they put all the scrap stuff in their front gardens, and before it was all collected I would go round. From a sponsor I got a composting toilet, and there was a low-flow shower head from another sponsor.” Other salvaged parts included carpet cutoffs for ceiling insulation, laminate flooring from numerous friends, non-itch insulation made from plastic bottles, light fittings and cabling to hook up solar panels from an office refurbishment, and a 1,400-litre fuel tank from a scrapyard.

“Mostly I did it all myself”, Pag says of the conversion process, adding: “But I didn’t know how to do it, so a lot of the time I did it wrong and when it broke I had to do it again.” He notes it would have been easier if he’d had more sponsors and gently bemoans the fact that the waste management companies he’d approached for funding were ‘understandably reticent’ to provide sponsorship.

In the end, the trip has been predominantly funded by Pag’s savings and by corporate talks he’s given along the way. But sponsorship, Pag claims, would have allowed him to make fewer compromises. The expedition’s homepage says the aim is to try to ‘get round the world emitting less than two tonnes of CO2 per person’ – two tonnes being the personal annual carbon footprint scientists recommend for the world’s population by 2050. When asked how that’s going, Pag notes with a laugh: “I’d say that’s been a colossal failure”, and explains that due to lack of funding, the truck has had to cross the oceans in container ships powered by conventional shipping fuels rather than “persuading the shipping companies to look at blending in a proportion of biodiesel”, which would have necessitated extensive research and testing. Moreover, because Pag didn’t have the funds to completely overhaul the engine before setting off, “it was pretty inefficient and was burning a lot of oil”. Eventually, though, “It had a complete meltdown in India and out there the cost of rebuilding the engine including parts was only $500, so I could afford it.”

The final nail in his carbon footprint’s coffin wasn’t lack of funding, though, but a container ship’s captain refusing to carry Pag along with his truck across the Pacific for ‘security reasons’. “It meant I had to fly, which pretty much sunk the whole thing.”

Pag has been keeping track of his fuel use, recording how many litres of what kind of fuel he’s found – predominantly used cooking oil, though some biodiesel has been thrown into the mix too – and what it would have been used for if not to fuel his trip. He notes: “I’m way over two tonnes, and that’s a pretty interesting lesson in that someone that’s been as obsessive as I have doing everything they can is still hopelessly way over two tonnes. It shows how difficult that’s going to be as a target for 2050.”

For his part, Pag has become convinced that energy efficiency and alternative fuels are not the answer: “The trip has convinced me that we won’t find alternative solutions that allow us all to live our lives without having a drop in standards of living. What I’ve seen is that in countries where energy is cheap people have a pretty good standard of living, and in places where energy is expensive they generally have a poorer one. The only way to solve this energy or this carbon question, I’m convinced, is by making energy expensive. In practice what happens if you make a car efficient, for example, people will drive it, and more people can afford to drive more, so efficiency is more than cancelled out.”

However, there are some major obstacles to allowing this ‘powering-down’ to come about: “No politician is ever going to say that, no voters are ever going to want to hear that.” Moreover, changes would have to occur in rich, Western nations for the benefit of poorer, at-risk countries, and as Pag points out, our track record for giving up luxuries for the greater good is dismal: “The question is: do you want to make those drops in your quality of life to help the developing world? And when you look at the history of that question when it has been asked about how we mine our mineral resources, fossil fuels, diamonds, rainforests – the answer has always been no.”

But this trip hasn’t just been about counting carbon and spreading a message (Pag insists he doesn’t want to tell people how to live their lives), it’s also been the fulfilment of a boyhood dream with many an adventure along the way. Not least among these was his detention in India charged with terrorism. Pag was imprisoned for a week in Ajmer in North India, and had to remain in the country for five months awaiting trial in truly bizarre circumstances: “Basically, in the Mumbai hotel shootings the terrorists used the same make of satellite phone that I had and therefore I must obviously be a terrorist. That was about the strength of it. It made no sense and that’s why it was so frightening because it could have gone really badly wrong.”

The charges were eventually dropped and some of India’s citizens paid for Pag’s €6,000 legal fees – just one example of generosity encountered on the trip. Pag’s fiancée (an American journalist who joined him on the road after writing an article about him) has said the breakdowns were the best bit as that’s when they met friendly, interesting people, and Pag confirms: “The more vulnerable a position I found myself in, the friendlier and the more helpful people were.”

And there’s more to come. After the brief London stopover, Pag and his fiancée were heading back to Mali, the site of his original epiphany: “We’re going to take the truck to Africa, slowly winding our way down. Basically, if we left the truck here it would just be destined for the scrapheap, so we’re going to take it to Africa where I know it will be useful and any problems with it will be patched up and repaired and they’ll strip all the innards out and turn it into a 50-seater bus.”

After the trip’s completion, a book will follow, and Pag hopes to speak at as many schools and businesses (including waste management companies) as possible. He adds: “I’ve got plenty of other ideas for projects that highlight recycling and waste management... I’m planning on building another bus and this time using reclaimed materials but maybe also more technology. I want to go from the lowest point of the world to the highest point... and push the envelope with the cooking oil to see how far we can get.” Pag realistically admits that cooking oil as fuel is not a “scaleable solution” to the world’s energy woes as there’s not much to go around. But there are lessons for everyone to take from this one man’s journey.

Follow the Biotruck Expedition online at: biotruckexpedition.org