George Monbiot is wrong on used cooking oil

George Monbiot is quite right that burning virgin vegetable oil in cars or power stations is crazy, but he’s wrong when he says that used cooking oil is the only sustainable biofuel – at least not for councils who are collecting food waste.

Over the last 18 months Camden Council has been running two of its vehicles on biogas made from rotting food waste. According to research that we commissioned, so long as it’s all burnt (which means keeping engines well-tuned), biomethane from food waste comes top of any list of sustainable fuels. In terms of carbon emissions it’s 80% better than diesel and a bit better than used cooking oil. But where biomethane beats used cooking oil hands down is in terms of air quality. Burning diesel creates tiny soot particles which cause lung diseases, blood-related diseases and even exacerbate conditions like diabetes. Used cooking oil is even worse than diesel in terms of emissions of particulates. Both fuels should be banned in towns and cities because they are sending us to an early grave.

In Camden we are looking to move our entire vehicle fleet to a combination of biomethane from food waste and electricity from renewable sources.

I should add that biomethane is absolutely not a solution for the world’s 800m cars – there isn’t enough of it and hopefully there will be a lot less of it in the future when consumers and supermarkets either learn, or are forced, to stop wasting so much food. But we will always have some food waste and so for councils it makes sense to turn it into a sustainable vehicle fuel that produces no noxious emissions.