Fast food giant McDonald’s is to fuel its trucks using biodiesel recycled from its cooking oil by Neutral Group’s biodiesel plant in Dubai.
The scheme is the second major biodiesel initiative announced this year after SS Lootah started its own programme with sister food company Al Islami in February.
Neutral Group’s deal with the world’s second largest restaurant chain will recycle oil from its 80 outlets. The company has been trialing the biodiesel with 12 trucks since the beginning of the year and will look to fuel the entire fleet by 2012.
While McDonalds uses 20,000 litres of cooking oil per year in the UAE it is still someway short of the Neutral Group’s 1 million year capacity. Chairman Karl Feilder, presumably with an eye for future demand from other companies, said that for the moment he is happy to be able to set the scheme up in a control manner.
“The quantity and the quality of their oil is very, very predictable, and that is magic for us,” said Mr Feilder. “We know how much oil we’re going to get from them and the quality we’re going to get. If we started to get this from all over the place in the UAE you’d get all kinds of problems.”
Optimistic that the producer will be able to use the McDonald’s deal as a springboard to attract other customers, Feilder also remained realistic about the scale of the challenge ahead.
“We’re in competition with the state-owned fuel monopoly,” he mused.
