2.

0 Literature Review

Cooking oil is one of the most basic ingredients needed to cook. Unlike other
ingredients, cooking oil is classified as a must have ingredients and it is largely in
every household and almost people who works in the food industries. An article
written by Berita Harian on May 2019, shows that Klang City Council manage to
collect 17 tonnes of cooking oil waste from several food industry premises around
Klang in just a year[1]. Since cooking oil cannot be reused due to its effects towards
human’s health, most of people would throw their cooking oil waste in the sink and
some even thrown their waste cooking oil to the ground. It is important to note that
waste cooking oil that was thrown could actually gives devastating effects to the
Earth.

Studies show that most of cooking oil produced by the industry such as vegetable
oil is considered as neutral [2]. However, another study shows that when cooking oil
are used, the number of pH slowly increases to a maximum value of pH of 10 as it
produces certain acid such as linoleic and oleic acid[3]. These acidic properties of
waste cooking oil is one among many other properties that pollutes not only the water
and air but also the fertility of soil. If waste cooking oil is thrown into the sink, it will
flows into the drainage system and eventually harms the aquatic living things. The
thrown waste cooking oil eventually coated the living organisms causes the oxygen
number to depletes. The depletion number of oxygen slowly kills the aquatic living
things [4].

When the cooking oil is thrown into the ground, the acidic properties would
eventually destroys the nutrients content in the soil. When this happen, the soil
fertility would decreases and later on cannot be used for planting. When rains happen,
the waste cooking oil molecules would mixed up together with the water that enters
the soil. Thus when rain stops, a number of waste cooking oil molecules will be
evaporated together with the water molecules. As this happen, the waste cooking oil
would produce unpleasant smell which causes air pollution as people would be
affected by the rancid odor produced [4].

As waste cooking oil gives disadvantages to the Earth, thus a lot of studies had
been done in order to overcome the problem. Through several experiments, it has
been shown that activated carbon from several items such as coconut husk and coal
can actually be used as a filter to remove the number of acid. Activated carbon from
these item have pores that are small enough to prevent acid molecules from the waste
cooking oil from passing through it. The same report however proposed that activated
carbon from the coconut husk are much better in comparison to the other items as it is
able to filter the highest number of acid molecules. To compare, coal for an example
can only decrease the acidic properties from vegetable oil that has a pH of 10 to 8.7.
However when the same sample of waste cooking oil, coconut husk are able to reduce
the acidic content up to pH value of 7.8 [5].

[1]http://www.bhplus.com.my/berita/wilayah/2019/05/562381/mpk-kumpul-
17-tan-minyak-masak-terpakai-untuk-kitar-semula

[2]https://www.machinerylubrication.com/Read/100/ph-test-tan-tbn

[3]https://www.thoughtco.com/the-ph-of-vegetable-oil-608887

[4]https://www.epa.gov/emergency-response/vegetable-oils-and-animal-f
ats

[5]https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.5061897