Since 2008 my company has provided scheduling services to the used cooking oil (UCO) recycling industry, using a customer relations database with turn-by-turn routing. In the year of maximum activity, our clients made 135,000 stops at about 40,000 restaurants and collected 7.9 million gallons of oil weighing 59,726,437 pounds.

About 77.4 percent of each pound of UCO is carbon. Thus the equivalent amount of carbon (est. 0.774 X 59MM = 46MM lb = 21,012 metric tons) was not extracted from the Earth as petroleum, because the oil came from agriculture, not from drilling, and the majority of the carbon was used twice, once for cooking and once for energy.

The USA adds approximately 1,424 million metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere each year, based on CO₂ emissions data from 2021. A national program to recycle 90% of UCO from restaurants could significantly reduce the US carbon emissions. As with all recycling efforts, each person or industry can achieve little, but together we can do much.

Now let's talk about that half-gallon of two-year-old Mazola under your kitchen counter.

Company profile