During the Mid-Autumn Festival, the nation’s famed pastry shops were as busy as ever — but this time they were kept busy dealing with long lines of people wanting to return products they had bought. The stores had no choice but to accept the returns and give customers their money back.
Faced with such an absurd situation, if people were to just point fingers at each other instead of thinking of how to establish a sound strategy to regulate the recycled oil industry, it is to be expected that similar tainted-oil scandals will happen again.
Waste cooking oil is a recyclable resource and it therefore has value. However, it cannot be dumped at will because this causes pollution and blocks up irrigation canals and sewers.
Waste oil mainly comes from frying done by restaurants and food factories. The average family or food stand uses a limited amount of oil, and the waste product usually contains a lot of impurities and is therefore used mainly to make products such as handmade soap.
Since the source of recycled oil that is reused by certain businesses comes mainly from restaurants and food factories, the first step in managing the use of waste oil is to require producers of this oil to declare where it goes. These producers should also be responsible for finding out where the oil ends up after it has been recycled.
The public is focused on where the tainted oil has ended up and which companies were unlucky enough to have used it in their food products. However, the more important question is where Kuo Lieh-cheng (郭烈成) — the main suspect in the scandal — sourced his oil.
If it came from well-established companies, they have to shoulder some of the blame. However, if the oil came from underground slaughter houses and even dead pigs, then the whole situation is far worse than thought.
Japan has many restaurants that use oil for frying tempura. The waste oil is mixed with soda granules, turned into paste and sold to soap factories. This way, the oil is not used for any other purpose, and shows the importance of controlling and managing waste oil at the source.
Other proper uses for recycled waste oil include as a biofuel, animal feed or an industrial chemical. For example, Formosa Plastics Group’s late founder Wang Yung-ching’s (王永慶) second-biggest wish was to recycle kitchen leftovers around the nation to make organic fertilizer, thus helping to solve the nation’s problem with soil acidification.
If not made into handmade soap, waste oil for all other uses must be processed with specialized equipment for chemical processing. This is not something that can be solved with a few barrels to store the waste in.
The filthy environment in Kuo’s factory that was seen in media reports was unsuitable even for producing animal feed, so it is unimaginable that such a place could be used to produce cooking oil fit for human consumption.
Since large fast-food chains and food factories use huge amounts of oil which they obtain through regular suppliers, demanding that suppliers of oil products establish reverse recycling mechanisms is therefore very important.
When oil has been used several times, its acidity increases and it should not be used again for food. Used oil should be taken back by the original supplier of these products so that it can be reused in other ways.
For example, such oil products can be broken down into glycerol and stearic acid, which are valuable chemicals and could possibly be provided to large factories producing animal feed for use in raw materials for their products.
Apart from increasing the recycling value of this resource, such a method can also help guarantee that the oil does not end up being used for inappropriate purposes.
Environmental protection and health departments must work together to establish a sound strategy for controlling the recycled waste oil industry, as this is the only way to stop similar incidents from happening again.
Chen Wen-ching works in the environmental technology field.
Translated by Drew Cameron
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