Honduras plans to turn cooking oil into soap and dog food

Very few 27-year-olds look at second-hand cooking oils and see green business opportunities to produce soap or dog food.

But that’s what Hugo Daniel Chávez, project manager at the NGO Susenta Honduras, did.

He told the BBC: “We have a lot of corporate and domestic customs, so we are working to change waste and give a second life.”

Throughout Latin America, millions of tons of cooking oil are consumed each year. It is commonly used for fried food, mainly chicken, plantain, fries and pork.

But reuse and heat too much – something that happens frequently in Honduras, where there is a huge black market where second-hand cooking oils can produce compounds that are not good for consumers’ health.

Improper discarding, it can also have huge harmful effects on the environment.

If it is discharged from the sink, it can damage the pipes and contaminate groundwater, and when it is thrown away by the side of the road, it can contaminate fresh water and the farming that many communities rely on.

Faced with these health and environmental hazards, the young green entrepreneurs behind Susenta are trying to come up with a solution that will not only give businesses the incentive to process their oil and the right grease, but also turn these waste into something useful.

Ricardo Pineda, executive director of the NGO, explained that their idea stems from the early efforts of different companies and organizations to convert second-hand cooking oil into biodiesel. “But in Honduras, we don’t have a biodiesel market,” he said.

“So we decided to make products that can do well in our domestic markets such as soap and dog food.”

To make people more attractive to get rid of oil legally than to sell it to unethical buyers, Sustenta offers to buy second-hand cooking oil and regularly source it from stores involved in its projects.

Their efforts have been internationally recognized, most notably when they were awarded a $20,000 prize as one of the winners of the 2023 Youth Energy Challenge, a global initiative jointly led by the Italian government and the United Nations Development Program.

Sustenta also received funding from the Dutch embassy in the region, which told the BBC it chose Sustenta because “their project provides an innovative and viable solution for an aggressive approach with social implications.”

“It (their projects) not only helps reduce environmental impacts by building a circular economy, but also empowers young people and women, the groups most affected by climate change and generates green employment opportunities.”

Sustenta offers 2.50 to 3.50 Lempiras (£0.08 and £0.11) per pound of used cooking oil.

And it’s not just small businesses dealing with.

In May 2024, NGOs signed a contract with retail giant Walmart’s Mexico and Central America divisions.

The contract guarantees the flow of used cooking oils and greases to Susenta from all companies related to Walmart, which Mr. Pineda said is crucial to Susenta’s project.

Mr Chávez added: “We need reliable processes to scale up production.

It then brings cooking oils and fats to a plant in Comayagua, where they are purified and processed in a reaction called saponification. This process combines fat or oil with alkali-producing soap.

Mr. Pineda said Sustenta is eager to develop a “circular ecosystem where we reuse everything.”

“Next to the plants that produce soap and dog food, others have a water purification plant, and we use water that the plants cannot purify, which is arguably our water cooling system,” he explained.

Mr. Pineda said the idea of ​​working with Walmart was to “sell dog food and soap we improved in Walmart’s waste.”

“They can profit from their own waste and see the economic value behind the circular economy,” he told the BBC.

The project has 15 per column (£0.45) per soap, and earns more than 106,000 per month (£3,194.70) without fixed costs such as salary, commissions and distributions.

Mr. Pineda stressed that “this money is not with us.” “We just helped implement the project and once it was up and running, we were looking for new opportunities,” he said.

The recycling of cooking oil is just a few projects running simultaneously in Sustenta.

The organization consists of young people under 30 and an average of 23 years old. Their youthful enthusiasm and enthusiasm and impatientness of the established way of doing things have been key to their approach.

“We started out as a young group, tired of the usual ways in which large institutions deal with climate change and environmental issues,” Mr. Pineda said.

“We want to create practical solutions instead of sitting and talking about what we can do.”

Their strategy is also different from that of other young environmental organizations in the region, which usually focus on confrontational approaches, attempt to stop large mining or energy projects and hold politicians accountable for corruption.

But Paola Acevedo, project coordinator at Susenta, said the two people who were close are not inconsistent, but complement each other: “This type of (classic) environmentalism is very important, and we undoubtedly need it.”

“We try to focus on solutions while others fight on the frontline,” she added.