We change about 438 gallons of oil a year, all of which is recycled, mostly into heating oil. We'd love to have a way to put that oil to better use and Valvoline now has a product, NextGen, which is 50 percent recycled oil, and we are pleased to offer it to our customers. We are eager to adopt environmentally friendly practices that offer at least the equal benefit of standard products.
This review at Green Auto Blog sums it up pretty well. Motor oil is 85 percent oil and 15 percent additives. When motor oil wears out, it's the additives that need replacing and the oil itself is fine. Valvoline's process removes the carbon, impurities and spent additives and returns the oil to its refined condition, then restores the additives. Even virgin oil is recycled, because crude oil is in an extremely impure state and it's only through refining that it attains the purity needed for engine lubrication. Our cars are made of recycled steel, our jet airplanes from recycled aluminum, our computers from recycled plastic and we write on recycled paper. There's no reason why we can't recycle oil in the same way.
NextGen costs the same as standard oil and reduces our need to drill and dig for oil. It's a much more economically beneficial to recycle oil than to burn it. So the next time you're coming in for an oil change, ask us about NextGen.
Diagram from Valvoline showing how its environemtally friendly recycled oil works