Inside Out

Environmentally friendly chips

Chip Fat

Terry Woo owns a fish and chip shop in Bromley.  He is doing well and business is good.  But there’s a growing by-product of Terry’s success - used cooking oil. The busier he gets, the more he accumulates.

He says: “I use about 60 litres of cooking oil a week – from this I have about 20-25 litres of waste oil to get rid of…”

It’s not just a problem for chip shops. Terry faces a common problem that many food-associated businesses also have: how to dispose of so much left over cooking oil?  In London more than 50 million litres of used fat is produced each year.

In the past it was all taken off their hands for free, ending up on farms to be added to animal feeds. However fears over BSE forced the Government to ban this practice.

Terry Woo

Businesses now have to pay to have it taken away and disposed of at landfill sites. This costs about £15 each time they collect it.  For Terry this means twice monthly visits and over a year the cost adds up.  It’s a cost he’d obviously rather not pay. 

Not all catering firms are as diligent as Terry.  They do not want the extra costs and hassle of arranging for their waste oil to be collected. Some opt from the easier option of pouring it down the drain. But this causes huge environmental problems – it’s also illegal.

Cooking fat solidifies in the sewers.  If it’s left, it will eventually block the pipes – preventing toilet waste and dirty water from flushing through. It can even causing flooding.  Thames Water currently spends £3.8 million a year clearing these blockages. They have to break up the fat with a high powered jet, suck it into a tank and take to a landfill site.

Jeff Farrow from Thames Water is overseeing the latest emptying of a sewer.  “Most of the problems come from typical London streets with lots of restaurants and take aways all in the same place; unfortunately some of them do discharge fat, oil and grease into the sewer.  We try and educate them, to work with them to help them stop putting the grease down there; but we will have to prosecute if someone decides not to follow the rules”.

However, there’s a new solution that could prevent the expensive clean up operations and legal prosecutions.

There is a new scheme that turns fat into oil. The fat is put through a revolutionary new process which transforms it into a form of fuel called bio diesel. It’s environmentally friendly and will run most diesel cars.

For the last few months Terry has taken part in a scheme that collects his fat for free so it can be turned into car fuel.

Karl Thorne of Bromley Council says: “We collect the oil, then it’s taken back to the yard where we process it.  Because it’s a free service, they’re obviously saving money and there are environmental benefits too as we are able to recycle it."

Terry says: “I think it’s brilliant. I don’t have to pay for it and the council gets what it wants.  I get rid of the stuff I don’t want.  It’s good for both parties.”

In the whole of the UK there are only a handful of companies making bio diesel from used cooking fat. 

Global Commodities in Norfolk is one such company.  They produce over 200,000 litres of bio diesel a week using oil from restaurants, take-aways and crisp factories.   Dennis Thouless explains the process:  “The oil comes to us in containers, we take it into the factory where we put chemicals with it to turn it into bio diesel.  This is then pumped out then stored in tanks and from there out to fuel and transport companies.”

There is no waste at all from this process; there is the bio diesel, there is glycerine and fatty acids which can be central heating oil.

Dennis presents Thalia with a finished bottle of bio diesel.  He tells her: “You can put this in your diesel car; it will run your car with no modifications at all.  Just pour it in.” 

Thalia asks if it will do any damage to her engine. “No”, says Dennis. “Except make it run better.”

Chip oil

Southwark Council is the first local authority to use bio diesel fuel to run its fleet. It currently use it in 65 of its vehicles but hope to double this figure in the coming months.

Phil Davies from Southwark Council says it has come up against manufacturers saying they can’t put plant fuel into the vehicles. “But now a lot of companies are thinking about it seriously and they’re getting involved in the testing. It’s a step forward but there was resistance in the first instance.”

They’ve found it gives off less harmful emissions than ordinary diesel, and is improving local air quality.   A few miles away in Bromley the local council also want to start using bio diesel. But they plan to go a stage further. 

From this Spring used cooking fat will be collected and then converted on site into bio diesel for use in local authority vehicles only.  This will the first bio diesel production plant based in a city environment anywhere in the UK.

Larry Parker of Sustainable Energy Action has been campaigning for the last few years to get the plant built.  He says it will be fantastic for London. “It will be a trailblazer, this will be a totally locally sustainable model whereby you’re using the waste resource, and transforming it into a high quality product.”

The Government is also starting to support the use of bio diesel – there is a tax break on it and they have released a renewable transport fuels obligation – this will mean that we will have to use more bio fuel in the future.   It is starting to be taken seriously.  

In London there are currently just 2 places where ordinary motorists can buy bio diesel – in France and Germany however they are much further ahead, it’s sold on most forecourts. 

We are catching up fast – in the next 10 years most of us could be filling up our cars with used chip fat oil.