Once oil has been used, it can be collected, recycled, and used over and over again. An estimated 380 million gallons of used oil are recycled each year. Recycled used oil can sometimes be used again for the same job or can take on a completely different task. For example, used motor oil can be re-refined and sold at the store as motor oil or processed for furnace fuel oil. Aluminum rolling oils also can be filtered on site and used over again.

Used Oil Can Be Recycled in the Following Ways:

• Reconditioned on site, which involves removing impurities from the used oil and using it again. While this form of recycling might not restore the oil to its original condition, it does prolong its life.
• Inserted into a petroleum refinery, which involves introducing used oil as a feedstock into either the front end of the process or the coker to produce gasoline and coke.
• Re-refined, which involves treating used oil to remove impurities so that it can be used as a base stock for new lubricating oil. Re-refining prolongs the life of the oil resource indefinitely. This form of recycling is the preferred option because it closes the recycling loop by reusing the oil to make the same product that it was when it started out, and therefore uses less energy and less virgin oil.
• Processed and burned for energy recovery, which involves removing water and particulates so that used oil can be burned as fuel to generate heat or to power industrial operations. This form of recycling is not as preferable as methods that reuse the material because it only enables the oil to be reused once. Nonetheless, valuable energy is provided (about the same as provided by normal heating oil).

Recycling Used Oil Is Good for the Environment and the Economy — Here's Proof:

• Re-refining used oil takes only about one-third the energy of refining crude oil to lubricant quality.
• It takes 42 gallons of crude oil, but only one gallon of used oil, to produce 2 ½ quarts of new, high-quality lubricating oil.
• One gallon of used oil processed for fuel contains about 140,000 British Thermal Units (BTUs) of energy.

What is Used Oil?
EPA's regulatory definition of used oil is as follows: Used oil is any oil that has been refined from crude oil or any synthetic oil that has been used and as a result of such use is contaminated by physical or chemical impurities. Simply put, used oil is exactly what its name implies--any petroleum-based or synthetic oil that has been used.

During normal use, impurities such as dirt, metal scrapings, water, or chemicals can get mixed in with the oil, so that in time the oil no longer performs well. Eventually, this used oil must be replaced with virgin or re-refined oil to do the job at hand EPA's used oil management standards include a three-pronged approach to determine if a substance meets the definition of used oil. To meet EPA's definition of used oil, a substance must meet each of the following three criteria:

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