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Degumming of Waste Cooking Oils

With the term "degumming" is usually described an important step in the purification of edible vegetable oils. It consists in washing the crude oil with water and is aimed to remove phospholipids and waxes from the unrefined oil. For more informations click here.

Why we should apply this treatment to Waste Cooking Oils (WCOs) which don't contain waxes or phospholipids?

It was 2012 when I proposed for the first time to degum WCOs. In the following years I had the possibility to take part to three main studies about the effect of water treatment on the composition or WCOs.


Thanks to some collaborations between the Politecnico di Milano and the University of Sassari, we could monitor the volatile fraction of samples of WCO prior and after several different water treatments.

We found that water is able to remove selected chemicals and that is possible to modulate this effect by acting on the pH and temperature (click here to be redirected to the paper).

Nevertheless, the removal of some chemicals as consequence of water treatment is almost without any utility if not employed for practical issues.

I believe that this specific treatment can represent a useful tool if WCOs are recycled for bio-lubricant production. In fact, we monitored the variation of the density and the flash point prior and after water treatment we observeed that these two very important (for lubricants) parameters can be notevoly increased.
Selecting oportunely pH, time and tempertarure is possible to increment the flash point till 15 °C without any loss in density. Click here to be redirected to the paper.

Finally, statistical multivariate analysis, and in particular Surface Responding Analysis (SRA) can be used to optimize the overall process. Click here for be redirected to the paper.


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