Australian Innovation: Chip Company Uses Leftover Cooking Oil to Create Plastic Packaging, Achieving a Recycling Closed Loop

Would you like your chips to come in packets made from the same material they were cooked in?

An Australian chip manufacturer is doing just that — using leftover cooking oil to create its packaging.

Snackbrands Australia, which produces a range of chips including Thins, CCs and Cheezles, has finished the first stage of its trial at Viva Energy's Geelong refinery.

The refinery normally produces soft plastics using fossil fuels but, at the start of this year, it trialled replacing crude oil with used cooking oil, importing about 120 tonnes from Snackbrands Australia's Sydney facility. 

The used cooking oil would normally be used for animal stock feed or sent offshore to make biodiesel.

Now it is being transformed into food-grade plastic, where it is heated before being converted into bio-based pallets and transformed into packaging. 

It is a first for Australia, with the new packaging set to appear in stores next year.

Snackbrands Australia innovation and sustainability director Tracey Seager said the initiative helped to reduce the company's reliance on brand new plastics and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

"For us, the exciting thing about the used cooking oil into packaging is it means that anything that we can send there, that would've gone to those other areas," she said.

"[It] means we're importing less fossil fuels or less tankers of oil coming into the ports in Australia," she said.

The 120 tonnes of used cooking oil was turned into 100 tonnes of soft plastic, then transformed into 15 million packets.

The company said it reduced the carbon emissions from production by about 70 per cent, when compared with crude oil.

Viva Energy produces about 80,000 tonnes of soft plastic every year which is used for food packaging, bank notes, takeaway food containers and face masks.

It plans to completely replace crude oil in its soft plastic production process with used cooking oils and plastic pyrolysis oil within the next five to 10 years.

Plastic pyrolysis oil is made from soft plastics by reheating it at an extremely high temperature. 

Viva Energy Australia's sales and commercial manager James Harrington said the company was looking to expand the initiative but needed more support.

"We are looking at other opportunities to offer bio-circular plastic. There is a lot of used cooking oil that's collected in Victoria that can be used for the same application," he said.

"It takes investment, collection, legislation and support from the government around mandated content for recycling targets."

Recycled packaging for landfill only

Mr Harrington said recycling the packaging made with cooking oil remained a challenge as, currently, it could only be disposed of in landfill.

Plastic pyrolysis was one of the solutions he suggested to avoid landfill. 

"We're looking to develop a way to dispose of it in a bag in normal recycling or take it back to a store," Mr Harrington said.

He said the company was investigating the soft plastic's integrity and had so far not found it to have adverse effects on the environment.

Deakin University sustainability senior lecturer Trevor Thornton said creating a closed-loop system was necessary to reduce the volume of waste going to landfill and its associated greenhouse gas emissions.

But he said it was important that consumers knew how to correctly dispose of the recycled packaging.

"I'd be more concerned about the community putting these types of materials into recycling streams, thinking it's plastic and it can be recycled and therefore contaminating it," Dr Thornton said.

He said another focus should be on reducing the amount of packaging to decrease the volume of recycling that was needed.

"You go to buy something, chips or whatever, and the packaging is twice the size of the actual content because it looks like you're getting a lot of food," Dr Thornton said.

"So we've got to look at all ways of trying to reduce the amount of packaging, regardless of what it's made of."