🔗 Gutter Oil

🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Medicine 🔗 China 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Medicine/Toxicology 🔗 Taiwan

Gutter oil (Chinese: 地沟油; pinyin: dìgōu yóu, or 餿水油; sōushuǐ yóu) is oil which has been recycled from waste oil collected from sources such as restaurant fryers, grease traps, slaughterhouse waste and fatbergs.

Reprocessing of used cooking oil is often very rudimentary; techniques include filtration, boiling, refining, and the removal of some adulterants. It is then packaged and resold as a cheaper alternative to normal cooking oil. Another version of gutter oil uses discarded animal parts, animal fat and skins, internal organs, and expired or otherwise low-quality meat, which is then cooked in large vats in order to extract the oil. Used kitchen oil can be purchased for between $859 and $937 per ton, while the cleaned and refined product can sell for $1,560 per ton. Thus there is great economic incentive to produce and sell gutter oil.

It was estimated in 2011 that up to one in every ten lower-market restaurant meals consumed in China is prepared with recycled oil. As Feng Ping of the China Meat Research Center has said: "The illegal oil shows no difference in appearance and indicators after refining and purification because the law breakers are skillful at coping with the established standards."

Some street vendors and restaurants in China and Taiwan have illegally used recycled oil unfit for human consumption for the purposes of cooking food, leading to a crackdown against such establishments by the Chinese and Taiwanese governments.

Gutter oil is an acceptable raw ingredient for products that are not for human consumption, such as soap, rubber, bio-fuel, and cosmetics.