Used cooking oil and the law of unintended consequences

15.07.19

As subsidies like the RTFO prioritise the processing of used cooking oil into fuels (a valid and logical aim in itself) there is a risk of generating a market for UCO so strong that it threatens to destabilise established eastern markets where Europe sources its UCO.

The demand for UCO doesn’t diminish in the East just because demand has grown in the West, and so those people in the East have done the most economically logical thing in the face of increasing prices: they have found the next best, cheaper alternative: palm oil.

A lesson, if there ever was one, that climate change is a global issue which requires global solutions.

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