People enjoy eating fried meals, but the cooking oil used to make them is usually wasted. GreenPan Initiative is a new youth programme that collects used cooking oil from households, restaurants and hotels and recycles it into useful products. The Initiative was launched by three young people —Nour Al-Assal, Ahmed Raafat and Mariam Afifi — as a social arm of the Tagaddod (“renewable” in Arabic) start-up, established in 2013, according to Ahmed Raafat, a Tagaddod co-founder. The start-up was established as a company working on renewable energy, and its first project was biodiesel produced from used cooking oil. Raafat explains that biodiesel is like the conventional diesel used to operate vehicles, generators and engines but is more environmentally friendly as it has 90 per cent less carbon emissions than regular diesel. It also helps to increase the durability of engines. The start-up also produces glycerin, used in the manufacture of cosmetics and soaps. The glycerin is sold as a lubricant, but there are plans to include it in cosmetics when the recycled product has been shown to be safe. One problem the start-up has faced is that despite the current diesel crisis in Egypt, which motivated the founders to make biodiesel fuel, they are currently unable to sell it. “We found that Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation rules say that only fossil fuels can be sold in Egypt: in other words, anything coming from petroleum derivatives. Thus, we do not have the right to sell biodiesel in Egypt.” However, the group has exported samples of the fuel to Turkey and Jordan. “The biodiesel has been tested and certified by the Egyptian Chemistry Association and compared to ASTM (American Society for Testing Materials) specifications,” its website says. One piece of good news came last June when the Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade agreed with the Ministry of Petroleum to recycle used cooking oil as biodiesel in the governorates. The agreement included collecting cooking oil from individuals, groceries and traders in return for points to exchange for free food. The oil is then handed to the Alexandria Company for Petroleum Additives and recycled as biodiesel. According to the Ministry of Supply, the project was begun in December in Port Said when 10 young people from the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, a private university, were trained in how to recycle the oil and provided with five recycling machines. For its part, GreenPan has decided to go “100 per cent local,” says Raafat. “Biodiesel-production technology already exists from the 1990s. But we did not buy-in this technology and instead did it ourselves and produced the machines in Egypt.” He adds that one litre of oil produces 0.9 litres of biodiesel. “If we have 100 tons of oil, we can produce 90 tons of biodiesel,” he says. Despite the recycling advantages, there are concerns that the used cooking oil could simply be sold on to others who could reuse it for cooking food with harmful consequences. Says Rafaat, “For our part, there would be no benefit from doing so. We have a recycling factory. We even pay for GreenPan with our own money. Some people think the oil we collect is sufficient for production on a mass scale, but we have not reached this phase yet. We buy oil from traders who buy it from restaurants and hotels, and we recycle it because we are convinced this is the right thing to do.” He adds that even their awareness raising is directed at preventing people from pouring the oil into bottles and putting it out with the rubbish because garbage collectors could pick it up and resell it, putting people's health at risk. He adds, “When oil is poured into drains it blocks pipes and pollutes the environment. One litre of waste oil can contaminate 100,000 litres of water.” To encourage people to pass on their used cooking oil for recycling, GreenPan gives them a free product as a gift for every three litres they receive. It also gives a major prize for the most oil collected over a period of four months, most recently a gold coin. At present, GreenPan plans to continue its development, hoping to grow and find more resources. “We are still not widely known, and we are experimenting so that when we work on a bigger scale people will more clearly understand what we are doing,” Raafat says. The writer is a freelance journalist.
