One Litre of UCO
Just one litre of used cooking oil can provide enough clean, green electricity to power all of the above. When full, one of our used cooking oil tanks can power an average home for an entire year.
Currently, around 110kt (kilotonnes) of used cooking oil is disposed of by UK householders each year. If we could recover all of that used cooking oil then we could provide enough electricity, each year, to power 110,000 homes with clean, green, carbon neutral electricity.
Recycling even a small amount of waste oil really helps to lower both carbon emissions and reduce the UK’s reliance on fossil fuels.
What a Waste
Used cooking oil is traditionally a sticky, hard to dispose of waste that causes an estimated £15 million worth of damage to UK drains and sewers each year. Just one litre of used cooking oil is enough to pollute up to a million litres of water. When sent to landfill oil can pollute watercourses, smother water dwelling plants and spread a thin membrane over water which prevents oxygenation thereby killing fish and other aquatic life. Waste cooking oil can even increase the amount of vermin in an area, as they are drawn to the protein in the oil.
Conversely, when recycled at your local household waste recycling centre, used cooking oil becomes a valuable resource once recovered into our LF100 bioliquid. Not only does used cooking oil create power, it also helps to reduce the UK’s reliance on fossil fuels, by providing an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional fuel sources such as gas and coal, thanks to the carbon footprint of the oil being ‘locked up’ during the cooking process.
Money Down The Drain
Not only is improper disposal of used cooking oil harmful for the environment, it also costs you money.
Each litre of used cooking oil tipped down the drain costs you 14 pence through water utility bills. However, recovering used cooking oil into renewable electricity will, in the long run, save you money and prevent damage to the environment.
Bioliquid vs Biodiesel
As mentioned in our ‘Recovery’ page, it is important to note that we are not biodiesel manufacturers.
There are only three steps in Living Fuels’ recovery process; we will never add chemicals, burn our oil or change the molecular structure of the vegetable oil. We do this to ensure that we reclaim waste oil in the most environmentally friendly way possible.
It has been proven that using recovered vegetable oil in a combined heat and power (CHP) unit, is friendlier for the environment than when used in biodiesel, as CHP captures both heat and energy, whereby recovered vegetable oil used in vehicular engines only captures the produced kinetic energy.
