Recycled Waste Cooking Oil for Fertilizer

Waste cooking oil from food establishments has been used to make a controlled-release fertiliser which results in less wasted nutrients and better plant health, reports The Lead South Australia.  Dr. Justin Chalker and his team at Flinders University of South Australia developed the fertiliser at the Institute for NanoScale Science and Technology.  The fertiliser uses waste canola oil and sulphur which is being used to form a degradable polymer coating to encase each fertiliser pellet. 
   
Testing was carried out on tomato plants and showed the nutrients were released in a controlled fashion, resulting in less wasted fertiliser and better health for growing plants. Another benefit of the slow release was that it prevented fertiliser runoff.  Dr Chalker announced that larger scale trials would be done to see if other similar fertilisers could be produced for other crops. He said that the polymer could be made from other plant-based oils such as sunflower oil or olive oil as long as they were unsaturated.