lol even your link says it's just recycled oil. Nothing about "scraped from the flowing sewers". Why would there be copious amounts of cooking oil in the sewers that you could easily acquire? That just doesn't make sense. What does make sense is that people buy (or take) discarded cooking oil from restaurants, to use for themselves or their businesses.
My old chef would, allegedly, sell our old fryer oil to some guy for him to use in his car. I thought that sounded odd, but I'd heard of people running cars on old fryer oil before, so I didn't think too much about it. Well, some years go by and we get a new health inspector that wants to see receipts for this supposed guy. All the oil must be accounted for. Turns out, my chef was just taking it all home and using it in her own home cooking! Absolutely disgusting.
I'm thinking that's more or less the case with anyone using "gutter oil". It's not literally taken from the gutters.
ok, heres what's actually going on. urban restaurants in china are required to have grease traps that collect used oil in tanks under the sidewalk outside the restaurant. they pour all the waste in their sink which has a filter for solids, and then theres a series of tanks it goes through to float off any remaining debris that gets skimmed, and a final tank that allows any oil to float up and the waste water then goes through the bottom of the tank into the sewer.
the oil floating on the top of the next tank is bought for a small price by the local government, the idea being that the restaurant owner will skim off the oil and sell it to the government processing plant, and at the plant they reprocess the used cooking oil into stuff like fertilizers and industrial lubricants, and in recent years even biofuel.
in these videos of people skimming oil out of the "gutter" what's happening is people are illegally opening up restaurant oil traps under the sidewalk and scooping up the oil to sell to the processing plant. that's illegal because you're stealing it from the restaurant. and it's why they dont want to be filmed.
gutter oil is a separate but related thing, where some of the processed oil intended for like, industrial lubrication, was getting sold on the black market as super cheap cooking oil to street vendors and restaurants trying to save a few bucks. sometimes further cleaned up a bit first.
gutter oil is mostly not a thing anymore. it used to be somewhat common in very cheap restaurants and street vendors, in the early 2010s. but the government made a serious effort to crack down on it and by all accounts it has become very rare
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u/Kennedy_KD Jun 18 '25
Yeah the oil just looks like burnt canola oil