Repurposing cooking oil into biodiesel in TN

To prevent health hazards owing to consumption of used cooking oil, the firm has tied up with FSSAI to be part of its repurpose used cooking oil (RUCO) initiative, which facilitates and supports collection of used cooking oils and its conversion into bio-diesel.

Earlier, Ananda Oil Corporation had tied with FSSAI – Madurai for collecting UCO. Till date, they have collected 30 MT’s of UCO from Madurai district in which 20MT of UCO was dispatched on Feb 14, 2020 to biodiesel manufacturer, which has been converted to biodiesel and distributed UCO-biodiesel to Indian Oil Corporation Hyderabad.

Dr T Anuradha, Designated Officer of Food Safety Department, Kancheepuram district, had distributed the RUCO labelled 30 litre storage containers to the FBOs in the district including CRCL, Sodexo, Arya Nivas through aggregator Ananda Oil corporation.

Anuradha also explained the process of collecting the used cooking oils and the multiple benefits arising from out of this initiative to the food business operators at the time of distributing the containers. Reusing cooking oil multiple times, she explained, is a serious health hazard which can lead to hypertension, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, liver diseases and other problems. Unfortunately, this is a rampant practice all over the country with the agents collecting the used cooking oil from the big hotels and restaurants after some filtering reaching it out to smaller hotels and again from there to the roadside vendors till it reaches the common man.

FBO’s are required to maintain record of oil purchased, used and collected/handed over to the approved Aggregator in a RUCO card provided by FSSAI. More than 300 hotels participating in this initiative have been given a sticker by FSSAI for prominent display in their premises. It is also to be noted that hotels/restaurants which do not enroll for this initiative do stand a possibility of their license being cancelled by FSSAI, given the serious health hazards of recycled used cooking oils.

Even FBOs benefit from this because Ananda Oil Corporation pays them Rs. 25 per kg of used cooking oil! Currently this initiative is being implemented in the cities of Madurai, Chengalpattu and Kancheepuram. The initiative will soon be rolled out in across Tamil Nadu in the coming months.