Increase in cost of oil changes?

Press, 14 March 1987, Page 8

Increase in cost of oil changes?

By

DAVID CLARKSON

Motorists may have to pay higher prices for oil changes to try to solve Christchurch’s waste oil disposal problem. Garages doing oil changes are unable to get rid of the waste oil because the bottom has dropped out of the re-refined oil market.

Talks are getting under way to try to find a solution, but the result may be that motorists getting oil changes also have to pay for the disposal of waste oil.

Until recently, the oil has been re-refined, but the recycled product lost its price advantage over new oil when goods and services tax was introduced last year. Since then, customers have been opting for new oil, and the used oil — very difficult to dispose of — has been building up in storage tanks. In the past, the garages have been paid for the waste oil, but the managing director of the Christchurch re-refining company, Glydol, Mr Neville Oetgen, says that arrange-

ment has now stopped. He accepts that if motorists paid garages for disposal of the oil, and the garages paid the collectors and re-refiners to dispose of it, the price advantage for recycled oil might be restored. A carrying firm brought a drum of its own used oil to the re-refinery yard yesterday, and agreed to pay Glydol to process it for its own reuse.

Mr Oetgen hopes other firms will agree to the same arrangement, but he says that would get rid of only a small part of

the city’s waste oil problem. The supervising health inspector of the Christchurch City Council’s pollution control office, Mr Klaus Prusas, said the council had been told of the oil problem two days ago.

He said he would discuss the problem with other City Council officers, and with the companies involved. “There are options available, but the problem is whether companies want to spend the money,” he said.