Recent Used Oil Paper

I have recently written a paper on Used Oil Recycling in the United States with information on the do-it-yourselfer oil changer. If anyone is interested please contact me. Below is a brief summary.

2006 Used Oil Recycling in America
Presented to The Twenty-Second International Conference on Solid Waste Technology and Management
March 19, 2007 Philadelphia, PA U.S.A.

By Robert Arner,

President,
Recovery Enterprises,
1925 Ridge Hollow Road
Edinburg, VA 22824

Introduction

Years ago there was a Pogo cartoon with a picture of an oil tanker in a backyard, and the caption read, We have met the enemy and it is us. At George Washington University in 1977 one of my environmental science books alerted me to the oil polluting my local watershed of Little Falls in Bethesda, Maryland that runs into one of the drinking water reservoirs for the nations capital. Since then I have promoted the recovery of do-it-yourself automotive fluids from every possible angle. I began this effort in Montgomery County, Maryland and started DCs used oil recycling efforts. I even helped build the regions largest used oil recycling facility and assisted Virginias used oil collection program since 1981. In America we can better use and conserve our oil. Each year we use hundreds of billion gallons of the worlds petroleum supplies. Yearly, Americans use over 7 billion barrels of oil products. Since the USA constitutes 4% of the worlds population, uses over 25 % of the worlds oil, and produces 22% of climate-altering CO2. We have a tremendous opportunity to best save our oil, especially our ubiquitous consumer crankcase drainings. At the well head, there is the one trillion gallons of oilfield waste we inject into deep wells in addition to the 3 billion tons of oil and gas wastes we generate yearly by our oil and gas exploration and production in the USA. The last public generated report to Congress on this subject was made by the Environmental Protection Agency back in 1986. At the back end, we waste 400 million gallons of used oil and discard hundreds million oil filters yearly in the United States. The current sampling method to evaluate the toxicity of oil, Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP) was designed for municipal landfills not oil so this testing procedure is outdated. I ask you to simply reflect on the fact that one gallon of used oil improperly disposed can contaminate one million gallons of fresh water or ruin the water supply for 50 people for a year.

Kindest regards,
Rob Arner

http://conservationmatters.blogspot.com
and http://rarner.bravehost.com/