Used Cooking Oil Collected at MOL Stations

On the occasion of International Biodiesel Day, the Hungarian Oil and Gas company MOL once again draws attention to environmental awareness and the environmentally friendly disposal of used cooking oil.

The company launched its used cooking oil collection program in 2011, which has collected more than 1,900 tons of used cooking oil in recent years, saving thousands of gallons of living water from pollution.

In Hungary, tens of thousands of tons of cooking oil are used every year. However, the fate of the used cooking oil generated during use has only been resolved in the company kitchens and restaurants, where the waste is transported and processed in an organized manner. Household frying oil ends up in drains or garbage, respectively.

A statement by MOL stresses that this is very harmful, as it causes clogging of the canal when it is deposited on the wall of the pipelines, about which it recently made an attention-grabbing animation video during the sewer design campaign of the Transdanubian Regional Waterworks Ltd. Used frying oil is not ideally placed in household waste, as it appears in landfills as a hard-to-decompose material. And if frying oil gets into living waters through negligence or deliberately, it is even more dangerous: it floats on the surface of the water in lakes and rivers and prevents oxygen uptake, thus destroying aquatic organisms. A single drop of used cooking oil can contaminate up to a thousand gallons of living water.

MOL has created an ideal solution for the environmentally friendly storage of household cooking oil by installing collection tanks at at least 350 filling stations across the country, so that the public can “get rid” of used cooking oil in a simple, fast and environmentally friendly way. And the numbers speak for themselves, as more than 1,900 tons of used cooking oil have been collected at MOL's filling stations since the initiative was launched in 2011.

It is Biofilter Ltd. that collects the used oil delivered at the designated MOL filling stations and, after purification, delivers it to Rossi Biofuel's Komárom plant where biofuel is produced from it. As a result, instead of environmentally harmful waste, a recycled, environmentally friendly product is produced, which is used in MOL's Százhalombatta refinery as a biocomponent for the production of diesel.