Valorization of Waste Cooking Oil

This work presents the work of a group of sophomore project students - a step towards the waste valorization and sustainability. The work explores the opportunities for creating value-added products from waste cooking oil (WCO) one of the waste streams abundant in food supply chains. With a focus on the WCO generation from commercial and residential cooking owing to life style habits and the economic factors this paper attempts to summarize the available data at the global, the national, the community level, and the underlying potential for WCO valorization complimented with a lab scale experiments to check the yield of biodiesel from WCO. The generation of WCO worldwide and in UAE, status of current disposal methods and environmental impacts, ongoing efforts and opportunities for WCO valorization into a source of energy to combat natural resource depletion are explored. This work is a small initiation by the future engineers to promote waste valorization for sustainability.