In the Tank, Not on the Table

By LI LI

By WANG HAIRONG

In the Tank, Not on the Table

By LI LI

The end of ‘gutter oil’ and the future of the bio-diesel industry hinge on better regulation of kitchen waste disposal

October brought both good and bad news for people concerned about China’s food safety. On October 13, the National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment was established under the Ministry of Health (MOH) in Beijing. Charged with studying the potential biological, chemical and physical hazards of commercially produced foods and food additives, the center is authorized to issue food safety warnings to relevant administrative organs. It will also establish an open database on food safety and regularly analyze data collected from 19 government departments whose responsibilities involve food safety.

The establishment of the center is seen as part of a broader government effort to raise confidence in China’s food safety.

China’s food industry has already been tainted in recent years by a number of scandals including toxic infant formula milk, pesticide-tainted vegetables, exploding watermelons, pigs fed with a banned, poisonous substance known as Clenbuterol and pork reconstituted as beef.

The reputation of China’s food industry suffered another blow recently following exposure of the gutter oil scandal.

Dirty business

As the name implies, gutter oil is usually scooped up from the gutters and sewers behind cooking establishments, then clarified and resold to restaurants. In a broader sense, the term can also mean oil refned from low-quality pork, animal by-products, and oil overused for fried food. As rising food prices have hit restaurants and consumers hard, the nauseatingly named oil, production of which involves sifting old pieces of food from the oil, has become extremely attractive to immoral restaurant owners and vendors looking to cut costs.

Just one day before the new food safetymonitoring center was established, the MOH announced that an effective way to distinguish gutter oil from regular cooking oil was yet to be found.

“None of the fve detection methods we trialed proved effective in identifying the illegal oil, and the authorities are still organizing experts to carry out research,” MOH spokesman Deng Haihua said at a press conference.

In mid-September, the ministry announced a project to develop testing methods for gutter oil by partnering with six statelevel research institutions. Meanwhile, an expert panel consisting of 13 oil processing, food safety and chemical analysis experts was established to examine and verify the five most promising alternatives selected from all the potential detection methods proposed nationwide.

However, none of the gutter oil detection methods trialed yielded satisfactory results.

PAH, a carcinogen, has been confirmed as the most hazardous content in the illegal oil. However, not all the gutter oil samples collected nationwide were found to contain PAH.

“Gutter oil makers have become really good at concealing their products’ differences from normal cooking oil,”The Beijing Newsquoted an anonymous disease control expert as saying. The expert said that even if one indicator was found to be effective in identifying gutter oil, the underground workshops would immediately update their product by adding chemicals so that it could cheat the test.

Although it has not been determined how carcinogenic gutter oil is, nutritionists have warned such oil can damage the gastrointestinal tract if consumed occasionally, and trigger cancer after long-term consumption.

“Animal and vegetable fat in refined waste oil will undergo rancidity, oxidation and decomposition after contamination, and produce toxic substances such as arsenic. It will cause indigestion, insomnia, liver discomfort and other symptoms,” said Zeng Jing, a nutrition expert at the Guangdong Armed Police Hospital.

Experts said that the failure to find a reliable detection method shows that the solution to the edible oil problem is systematic monitoring.

As part of the crackdown on substandard cooking oil, the police announced on September 13 the arrest of 32 criminal suspects for allegedly producing and selling gutter oil.

More than 100 tons of gutter oil was seized after the police busted a criminal network spanning 14 provinces, the Ministry of Public Security said in a statement.

“In less than two years, more than 10,000 tons of gutter oil entered the market. We are still probing the case,” Hong Jufeng, a police officer involved in the crackdown, told Xinhua News Agency.

The police began their investigation in March after residents in Ninghai County, eastern Zhejiang Province, reported that agroup of people were buying leftover oil from local restaurants.

GREEN RECYCLING: A worker at Xiamen Zhuoyue Bio-Fuel Co. Ltd. in Fujian Province compares samples of bio-diesel made from gutter oil (right) and its raw material

The 32 criminal suspects were caught in a cross-province raid in mid-July, when police officers from Zhejiang, Shandong and Henan provinces jointly busted six underground workshops and two illegal production lines, police authorities said.

Oil is used extensively in Chinese cuisine and the country’s 1.3 billion population means that enormous quantities of cooking oil are used annually. Ensuring the proper disposal of all this oil is a major national concern.

“ China consumes over 22.5 million tons of cooking oil per year,” said He Dongping, a professor at Wuhan Polytechnic University. He also estimated that one out of every 10 restaurant meals was probably cooked in waste oil.

A struggling industry

Although it poses serious health hazards on the dining table, gutter oil is an ideal raw material for producing rubber, soap, cosmetics and bio-fuel.

Across China, several companies have been licensed to collect gutter oil for reprocessing into soap, fuel and other products.

During the latest gutter oil crackdown, however, Gelin Bio-Energy Co. Ltd. in Shandong Province, a bio-diesel firm licensed to collect waste cooking oil for use in fuel, was accused of selling reprocessed gutter oil back to restaurants. Investigators found more than 100 tons of gutter oil in various stages of processing at the company. Company heads admitted gutter oil provided a better return than bio-diesel that the company originally produced.

HAZARDOUS WASTE: Unprocessed gutter oil found by the police in Gelin Bio-Energy Co. Ltd. in Shandong Province

Many bio-diesel frms are simply being forced out of business. Illegal collectors of kitchen waste oil pay restaurants high prices for monopoly rights, making bio-diesel companies’ production neither proftable nor sustainable.

Zhou Kequan, President of a bio-diesel company in Foshan, Guangdong Province, told theSouthern Metropolis Dailythat his company could only purchase 200 tons to 300 tons of kitchen waste oil per month, far below its designed processing capacity.

Zhou said that just fve years ago, kitchen waste oil was sold at 1,600 yuan ($250) per ton and the profit for producing bio-diesel out of waste oil was 2,200 yuan ($344) per ton. Nowadays, kitchen waste oil is sold at between 5,500 yuan ($859) and 6,000 yuan ($937.5) per ton and bio-diesel production has become unproftable.

Many companies pooled money to fund bio-diesel factories in 2007 and 2008 due to government incentives. But 90 percent of them have closed down due to a lack of raw material. Only about a dozen bio-diesel factories have survived and are struggling for life.

Lu Huan is vice president of a biodiesel company based in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. Though the city has only two companies that are licensed to process kitchen waste, Lu said that the processing line of his company has been idle for years due to its inability to collect enough kitchen waste.

Lu said he hoped that more companies could join the industrial chain of kitchen waste processing. “The collection, storage and processing of kitchen waste should be undertaken by different companies so that bio-diesel companies can focus on processing,” he said.

Lin Jianmin, a senior researcher with the Research Institute of Petroleum Processing under Sinopec Corp., said that to ensure the development of the bio-diesel industry, the most urgent task for the government is to improve legislation on the disposal of kitchen waste, in order to prevent gutter oil from making its way to dining tables and make waste cooking oil more affordable for biodiesel companies.

The government has made some legislative efforts to resolve the gutter oil problem over the past few years, which Zhou said had succeeded in easing the waste-oil shortages faced by bio-diesel companies somewhat. Despite this, the laws and regulations have not been well implemented and kitchen waste continues to fetch a high price.

“I believe that with the improvement of people’s living standards and social ethics and more attention from the government, the gutter oil problem will eventually be eradicated,” said Professor He at Wuhan Polytechnic University.

OIL SAFETY: A food safety regulator registers cooking oil samples at a restaurant in Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, on September 17

By WANG HAIRONG

Despite fast development, many residents in Chinese cities struggle to find a decent life

When talking about poverty in China, people tend to conjure up images of farmers struggling in remote mountain villages or in the arid lands of the far west. Yet behind their gleaming skyscrapers and rapidly developing infrastructure, China’s cities also hide millions of impoverished residents.

The urban poor numbered 50 million in 2009, or about 8 percent of China’s total urban population, according to the annual Blue Book on China’s Cities, which was published this August by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

Luo Peng is one of the urban poor. Out of the window of his room in Maizidian, a wealthy neighborhood in the Chaoyang District of Beijing, he can see upscale offce blocks and high-end restaurants serving exotic food, which are patronized by clients in luxury cars.

Luo and his parents share a one-bedroom apartment in a crumbling old building, which, surrounded by brand new luxury condominiums, looks completely out of place.

Ten years ago when Luo was still a student, a serious illness paralyzed his legs and threw his family into poverty. Luo’s mother quit her job to take care of him. From then on, the whole family lived on his father’s salary, a meager 700 yuan ($110) per month. Medical bills swallowed all their savings and left them deeply in debt.

The Maizidian Neighborhood has a residential population of more than 30,000 and is home to 93 officially poor families. Most of the poor families in the area had chronically ill family members, according to a survey conducted by the Institute of Social Development and Public Policy of Beijing Normal University in 2008.

Only about a third of these poor families had medical insurance that covered all or part of their medical expenses. The other two thirds have to borrow money to pay medical bills.