MIRI: The Miri City Council (MCC) has been approached by an Australian company interested in collecting used cooking oil in the city for its organic pesticide production.
Mayor Adam Yii said the company also indicated its interest to set up a factory here to process used cooking oil into organic pesticide.
“A company in Australia has contacted me and indicated their interest to work with MCC by collecting used cooking oil for their organic pesticide project.
“If the effort can be made possible, the company has the interest to set up a factory for organic pesticide in the city,” he said in a press conference after chairing a full council meeting yesterday.
However, Yii said the proposal is still at the initial verbal stage and the council has yet to receive an official proposal from the company.
Even so, he is looking forward to such a proposal in order to ensure that used cooking oil collected from hotels, eateries and households will not end up back in the food chain, or simply discharged anywhere causing pollution to the environment. At the moment, the mayor said there were two companies collecting used cooking oil in the city.
“The companies have been collecting used cooking oil in the city for many years already.
“They told us that the used cooking oil they collect would be shipped to a company in Kuala Lumpur and then processed into biodiesel before being marketed to European countries.”
Earlier during the full council meeting, deputy mayor Julaihi Mohamad voiced on the need for MCC to get black-and-white documentation from the two companies on what they had done with the used cooking oil which they had collected.
Based on the report by MCC’s Local Agenda 21 (LA21) and Community Development standing committee, Julaihi noted that more than 160,000 litres of used cooking oil had been collected by the two companies from January until May this year.
He stressed the council had the right to know whether the used cooking oil collected by the companies had been properly managed as claimed.