Honduras scheme, turning cooking oil into soap and dog food

Few 27-year-old children look at the used butter for cooking and see a green opportunity to produce soap or dog food.

But this was done by Hugo Daniel Chavez, the leader of the NGO project Sustenta Honduras.

“We have so many businesses and internal practices that create waste, so we try to transform waste and give it a second life,” he told the BBC.

In Latin America, several million tonnes of cooking oil are consumed every year every year. It is often used for frying food, mainly chicken meat, straps for plantations, chips and pork.

But re -use and heating it too often – as is often the case in Honduras, where there is a huge black market for used cooking oil – it can create compounds that are bad for consumer health.

Improperly discarded, it can also have a huge pernicious effect on the environment.

If it is drained on the sink, it can damage the pipes and pollute groundwater, and when thrown from the side of the road, it can pollute the fresh water and the crops that many communities rely on.

Faced with these health and environmental hazards, the young green entrepreneurs behind the Sustenta have tried to come up with a solution that will not only give businesses an incentive to properly throw away their oil and reduce, but also turn these waste products into something useful.

NGO Executive Director Ricardo Pineda explains that their idea comes from more efforts from various companies and organizations to transform used biodiesel cooking oil. “But in Honduras we don’t have a biodiesel market,” he says.

“So we decided to produce products that can handle our domestic markets well (such as soap and dog food).”

In order to make it more attractive for people to get rid of oil legally rather than sell it to unscrupulous buyers, Sustenta offers to buy the used cooking oil and collect it regularly from the stores that participate in their project.

Their efforts were given international recognition, mostly when they were awarded $ 20,000 as one of the winners of 2023, the Youth CLIMATE ENERGY CHALLENGE, a global initiative led by the Italian Government and the United Nations Development Program.

Sustenta also receives funding from the Netherlands Embassy in the region, which he told the BBC that he had chosen Sustenta, as “their project offers an innovative and viable solution using an enterprising approach that has a social impact.”

“He (their project) not only contributes to the reduction of environmental impact by focusing on the creation of a circular economy, but also enables young people and women – the groups that are most affected by climate change – and generates green jobs.”

The Sustenta offers between 2.50 and 3.50 lempters (0.08 and 0.11 pounds) per kilogram used cooking oil.

And it’s not just the small companies he deals with.

In May 2024, the NGO signed a contract with the Mexican and Central American department of the retail giant Walmart.

This contract guarantees a flow of used butter for cooking and fat from all companies related to Walmart with SUSTENTA, for which G -n Pineda says it is crucial for the Sustenta project.

“We needed a reliable flow to increase production. (…) Otherwise, we could quickly leak from used cooking oil because of the black market that competes with us,” adds G -N -Chavez.

It then carries the cooking oil and the fat of a plant in Komayagua, where they are purified and processed in reaction known as crippling. This process combines fat or oils with soap alkali.

D -n Pineda says Sustenta wants to develop a “circular ecological system in which we reuse everything”.

“To our plant that produces soap and dog food, someone else has a plant to purify water and we use the water that the plant cannot purify, its waste, so to speak, for our water cooling system,” he explains.

The idea of ​​partnering with Walmart, says G -n Pineda, is “to sell the food and soap for dogs we have refined from their Walmart waste.”

“They could benefit from their own waste and also see the economic value behind the circular economies,” he told the BBC.

At 15 lempiras (0.45 pounds) per soap, the project makes a monthly revenue of over 106,000 leubles (3.194.70 British pounds), which excludes fixed costs such as salaries, commission and distribution.

D -n Pineda emphasizes that “the money does not remain with us.” “We just help the project and as soon as it works, we are looking for new opportunities,” he says.

The recycling of cooking oil is just a few projects working at the same time in Sustenta.

The organization consists of young people, all under 30 and an average of 23 years, and their youthful enthusiasm and impatience with the established ways of doing things are key to their approach.

“We started as a young group that was ill with the regular ways that big institutions deal with the problems with climate change and the environment,” says G -N -Pineda.

“We want to create real solutions and not to sit around just to talk just about what can be done.”

Their strategy is also different from that of other young environmental organizations in the region, which often focus on a confrontation approach, trying to stop major mining or energy projects and keep politicians responsible for corruption.

But the coordinator of the project of the SUSTENTA, Paola Acevedo, says that the two are approaching are not in contradiction, but rather complement each other: “This type (classical) environmentalism is very important and there is no doubt that we need it.”

“We are trying to focus on solutions while the rest fights on the front lines,” she adds.