Cooking Oil and Your Carbon Footprint. What’s the Connection?

As we watch oil prices and concern over greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels increase by the hour it seems, the recycling of cooking oil is a hot restaurant industry topic. So, on the heels of our recent blog post Go Green … and Your Restaurant’s Bottom Line will Thank you, we wanted to dig deeper.

Our findings: recycling cooking oil and turning it into biofuel (which produces near zero emissions) to replace coal and other fossil fuels for heat generation and powering equipment has become a driving force for restaurants to up their sustainable practices ante and reduce their carbon footprint in a major way.

So much so, organizations such as The Alternative Fuel Foundation and the Association for Restaurant Owners for a Sustainable Earth (AROSE) are dedicated not only to educating restaurant services professionals on the benefits of turning their cooking oils into biofuel, but to the arduous task of collecting, converting and ultimately recycling cooking oil.

In fact, AROSE collects and recycles in excess of six million gallons of used cooking oil every year!

So, is it worth the effort? It sure is! According to AROSE biodiesel yields 93% more energy than the energy invested in its production.

For more information on turning your restaurant’s cooking oil into environmentally friendly biofuels check out The Alternative Fuel Foundation.  Also visit Carbonfund for more solutions to reducing your carbon footprint.