Cambridgeshire Council to offer cooking oil recycling
August 27, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Both residents and the environment will benefit from a scheme being introduced in Cambridgeshire, to recycle cooking oil. Living Fuels, a company operating from Norfolk, has joined forces with Cambridgeshire County Council to provide banks at ten civic amenity sites across the county.
Householders will be able to take their used cooking oil in sealed containers to their nearest bank. The banks will be emptied and the contents taken to a plant in Thetford where it will be converted into LF100 fuel, which can be used to produce clean electricity. Currently Living Fuel collects around 80,000 litres of oil which converts into electricity for 5,700 homes. The estimate for the total amount of cooking oil used each year in the UK is 225,000 tonnes, which has the potential for producing energy for 2,200 homes. For further details of just what the process involves see the company website.
The scheme is good news too for Anglian Water, who estimate that they spend £5 million each year dealing with blockages in drains and sewers, caused by people pouring old cooking oil down their sinks and toilets.
Living Fuel already provides banks free of charge in Suffolk and Norfolk and plans are afoot to extend the scheme to London, where they will be providing two banks in each of three as yet unnamed boroughs.
In the past, most of its supplies of used cooking oil have come from the hospitality industry, schools and prisons, local authorities and government agencies and the food manufacturing industry, with private households being a previously untapped source of raw material.
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