Valencia Installs 300 New Domestic Oil Recycling Containers on Public Roads

(Valencia Plaza (Google Translation)) The Valencia City Council has begun to install the 300 new domestic oil recycling containers, which are expected to be located in different streets and squares of the city of Valencia until the beginning of next year, according to municipal sources.

The vice mayor and councilor for Urban Ecology, Sergi Campillo, has presented this action, which is part of the initiatives approved within the framework of the participatory budgets Decidim València 2019-20, and which involves "quadrupling the number of existing containers of this type in the city".

Campillo has presented the campaign next to the container set up at the intersection of the streets of Convent de Sant Francesc and Sant Pau, in front of the Lluís Vives Institute. As he explained, the initiative has a total budget of 300,000 euros, and will make it possible to have "at least one recycling container for domestic oil in each neighborhood and in each town of Valencia so that all residents of any point can recycle your used oil. "

In this way, the network of domestic oil containers in the city is quadrupled. Until now, there were only 97 360-liter containers installed inside buildings and municipal offices, with storage times and accesses that did not facilitate recycling. From now on, the mayor added, "we have 300 more containers, which will be fully visible and accessible at any time of the day so that neighbors can recycle their domestic oil."

The council has remarked that it is very important not to pour household oil down the kitchen sink or sink because oil is a great water polluter. According to various studies, a liter of domestic cooking oil can contaminate 1,000 liters of water, making its purification very expensive.

For this reason, in each container we have placed a large vinyl with the environmental information on how to manage the oil and prevent people from pouring it down the kitchen sink.

The containers have been manufactured by the company Cervic, from Ibi, which was awarded in the tender, with which the initiative allows, at the same time, "to promote the local Valencian industry".

The new elements will be distributed throughout all the neighborhoods and towns of Valencia next to or very close (visually) to the 300 containers for the collection of clothes and textiles that are already installed in the city. The distribution has been planned by virtue of the resident population, in a proportional way; and as a whole, the ratio will be one container for every 2,660 inhabitants.

In this sense, he has pointed out that the estimates of quantities of oil collection planned will exceed 30 tons per year that were collected in the 97 current containers (and that represent only 0.04 kilo of oil per inhabitant and year). This data contrasts, Campillo stressed, with the 2,000 tons of clothing and textile waste that are removed each year in the 300 clothing containers installed in public spaces (the ratio is 2.5 kilograms of clothing per inhabitant per year).

The first 106 containers will be installed with a filling sensor, connected via mobile telephone communication to a computer application that will monitor the filling status, as well as movement actions and temperature variations. In this way, the collection and emptying periods of the containers will be optimized, which will therefore be more sustainable.

Campillo recalled that used cooking oils collected separately can receive treatments by means of which they are prepared for the production of biofuels, soaps and other uses in the chemical industry (waxes or varnishes) which allows reducing the use of resources from raw materials , and boost green economic activity.

Furthermore, the production of biodiesel (BD100) from used oils entails a fossil energy saving of 21% in relation to the use of crude oils, and a saving of 96% in fossil energy compared to the production of diesel. Each kilogram of oil collected can be transformed into 0.92-0.97 kilograms of biodiesel. READ MORE