Waste vegetable oil acquisition?

The viablity of this is really down to price. In the UK fuel is so expensive that people actually buy drums of new vegetable oil to run cars. I have even seen someone going round the supermarket filling a trolley with plastic bottles of oil when its on special offer. I would guess that if veg oil costs not much less than fuel in your country then you would need to use waste oil to make it worthwhile. Waste oil needs to be filtered.

I would recommend doing a search at

and specifiy pages from the UK Look for biodiesel and simialr search terms. There is lots of info out there or try uk.rec.cars.misc

Well, there are alot of choices. If you want to do the whole process yourself, it is the matter of just asking the owner to take used oil from them. Majority of them pays someone to remove it for them... not much money though but some vendors are so stingy they still want to charge restaurants more money.

Restaurants use oils regularly so they also have tons of those 4 or 5 gallons containers they throw out... you can ask them to put them aside for you or if they will simply pour them into the container for you... perhaps you can supply them widemouth funnel to make their job easier. Otherwise, you just need a pump to remove it from the tank... only skim the top to get the good oil... bottom are water and gunks. So it helps to let the oil settle then ask them to put it in containers for you.

Other choices is simply buy the strained WVO from other people... like in Connecticut there are biodiesel coop... where people share a tank... one person handle all the work and you pay... like a dollar a gallon. Biodeisel coop also buy biodiesel from commercial supplier but they cost $4 a gallon... yet, the plus side is no OPEC oil... all vege and animal fat processed.

There are vast resources on internet... just look into it.

My question is whether anyone has actual experience doing this. I know it's possible, but from a practical standpoint, why should a restaurant start storing oil seperately, putting the good stuff aside in seperate containers, take space to store it, hoping I'll actually show up to take it, compared to just dumping it in some big oil dirty tank they already do? That;'s why I'm curious as to what the actual reaction has been.

check out willie nelson's bio diesel page

About 5 years ago I had an arrangement with a local fish and chip shop, they would drain off their oil into the empty containers the new stuff came in and I would pick it up at my leisure. Eventually they were producing far more waste oil than I could use - 400 to 500 litres a week and I had to ask them to stop for a while. When I wanted to startup again a commercial concern had started up a mini tanker filtration system, they pump the oil from the fryers to a tanker with about 10 fine filters, the oil is then pumped back to the fryers and re used. Upto five filtrations now take place now before the oil is disposed of in the tanker. They use a pH test on the oil to see if its still ok to use. Not sure how that all works though.