With this little trick, you can make festive baking and cooking more sustainable – drop off used cooking oil at MOL gas stations!

(Photo: Pixabay)

MOL helps to make end-of-year holidays sustainable with an environmental protection initiative: by collecting used cooking oil, it offers a solution available to everyone for one of the biggest challenges of the Christmas season. Due to the collection and processing started in 2011, almost 3,000 tons of biofuel has been made from cooking oil that has become waste thanks to the cooperation between MOL and consumers – showing the potential of the circular economy in practice!

The festive baking and cooking typical of the entire country during the Christmas period, in the last days of December, is always considered a special period in terms of the use of cooking oil

For Hungarian families, one of the typical forms of expression of love is the delicacies on the table. Fortunately, there is now a solution so that this tradition does not represent an increased burden on the environment: as we were used to in previous years, MOL organizes the collection and processing of used cooking oil for the public with an ever-expanding coverage.

In Hungary, as in other EU member states, used cooking oil is considered harmful waste

The reason for this is that, although it is of natural origin, it can contaminate up to one million times its own amount when it gets into the soil or natural waters and comes into contact with water: it forms a thin film on the surface of the water and blocks oxygen from the organisms living in the water. Therefore, it is forbidden to mix used oil with household waste or pour it down the drain – its separate treatment, however, often presents the population with a difficult task. At the same time, MOL makes it easier for all those who want to manage the fate of the used cooking oil produced in their homes in a sustainable way: in the filling station search engine on the company’s website, and in the free Mol Move application, everyone can easily find the MOL closest to their place of residence or the one that happens to be on the road during Christmas visits to relatives. – well, where the oil – up to 10 liters, unmixed with other waste and chemicals, in any storage box – can be delivered to the well management staff.

MOL uses the purified, reprocessed used cooking oil for the production of biodiesel at the Rossi Biofuel plant in Komárom

The endeavor fits closely into the company’s strategy until 2030, which focuses on sustainability and the circular economy, since it treats waste as a raw material – i.e. ultimately as a renewable energy source – which would be a source of serious environmental damage without recovery and processing. Thanks to the efforts of MOL and the cooperation of the public, the collection, which currently covers around 350 filling stations in Hungary, has produced impressive results: while in 2012 the amount returned nationwide was 80 tons, in 2020 it reached 464 tons. Over the past 11 years, a total of 2,843 tons of used cooking oil have been collected at the wells, freeing the environment from the same amount of hazardous waste and significantly contributing to increasing the efficiency of biodiesel production.

“The most important message of our initiative is that, thanks to the modern solutions of the circular economy, baking and cooking need not be a burden on the environment. By offering our consumers an alternative to the treatment of used cooking oil, we can now make Christmas greener. Thank you for the public’s cooperation and environmentally conscious thinking for more than a decade now!” – said András Orosz, director of retail at MOL Hungary.