Business Plus
Bangladesh’s waste oil recycling industry is expanding, reducing imports and pollution, but illegal operators, weak enforcement and high taxes limit its full potential
10 hour(s) ago
Jagaran Chakma
For decades, waste engine oil from vehicles, factories, and shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh was treated as little more than toxic waste.In Chattogram’s industrial belt and the shipbreaking yards of Sitakunda, this discarded lubricant -- widely known as “pora mobil” (burnt engine oil) -- routinely flowed into rivers, canals and open land with little oversight and almost no organised recovery system.Today, that waste is feeding a growing recycling industry.What began in the late 1970s and 1980s as small-scale efforts by a handful of local entrepreneurs to recover and reuse discarded oil has gradually evolved into Bangladesh’s lubricant re-refining industry -- a business now tied to industrial demand, import savings and resource recovery.
