Waste Cooking Oil Case Study

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1.2 Waste cooking oil (WCO) as biodiesel feedstock
Huge quantities of waste cooking oils and animal fats are available across the world, especially in the developed and developing countries. Such oils and fats set a significant challenge because of their disposal problems and possible contamination of the water and land resources. Even though some of this waste cooking oil is used for soap production, a major part of it is discharged into the environment. According to a study performed in USA, 40% of the sewerage system blockages are caused by the waste frying oils poured into kitchen sink [13]. Moreover, waste frying oils have eco-toxic properties. If they are spilled onto ground, they will contaminate the soil and so damage plants.
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Since one of the major concerns on biodiesel production is the price of feedstock, utilization of waste cooking oil significantly enhances the economic viability of biodiesel production. India is producing around 9.2 million tonnes per year. In future India may emerge as top WCO producing county in the world because of its population growth and in next few years India may cross the United States WCO production. China has highest population in world, even though its WCO is around 4.5 million tonnes per year. It’s mainly because of unawareness of usage of waste cooking oil in people. United States is producing more WCO in world. In US, waste cooking oil is major feedstock for production of biodiesel. United States has separate collection units to collect waste cooking oil in major cities to produce …show more content…

However, homogeneous acid catalyst presents low catalytic activity so that longer reaction time and higher reaction temperature are required [4–6] . Problems associated with heterogeneous base catalysts are, deactivates when expose to ambient air, sensitive to FFA content in oil, too much soap formation and cause problem during product purification and leaching of catalyst active sites may result to product contamination. Heterogeneous acid catalysts represents higher cost because of complicated catalyst synthesis procedures, high reaction temperature, high alcohol to oil molar ratio and long reaction time are required and leaching of catalyst active sites may result to product contamination. Main problems associated with enzyme catalysts are, have slow reaction rate, even slower than acid-catalyzed transesterification, high cost, sensitive to alcohol, typically methanol that can deactivate the enzyme

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