Cooking oil, chicken to power UK supermarket trucks
Date: 06-Dec-01
Country: UK
Asda's Environment Manager Ian Bowles said the chain's 258 stores in the United Kingdom generated 138,000 litres of chicken waste and cooking fat, which after April would be transformed into biodiesel and used to fuel delivery lorries.
"Historically, chicken waste and used cooking fat from our in-store rotisseries and canteens has gone to landfills but now we have a more sustainable option...urning it into environmentally friendly fuel," Bowles told Reuters.
"This is very, very clean fuel using real cutting edge technology," he said adding there was huge future scope to process waste food into fuel.
The used cooking oil is subject to a process called esterification, in which hydro and carbon molecules are altered, yielding product similar to diesel oil.
"The UK produces 50-90 million litres of waste cooking oil a year and it seems like an awful waste of resource to just send it away to landfills or pour it down the sink," Bowles said.
