Industrial designer Danielle Coffey has developed a kit that turns waste oil into soap. The invention aims to encourage you to recycle waste fat and oil yourself.
Now you can reuse your used cooking oil. Assuming that you collect it in a glass and dispose of it. Unfortunately, the opposite is often true, with fatbergs (in German) forming more and more often in England showing that cooking fat and oil are being poured down the kitchen sink rather than being disposed of in the bin, clogging the pipes and contaminating the sewage system. Industrial designer Danielle Coffey is tackling this problem with a kit that turns waste oil into something useful: soap that even smells nice.
The «Sápu» kit, named after the Icelandic word for soap, allows you to recycle waste household fat. You collect your waste cooking fat in a container, where it passes through a non-toxic, biodegradable filter. This eliminates all residual food, including smells.
A window in the container shows when you have enough filtered oil to blend and make soap. Then you can add in six spoonfuls of water and two spoonfuls of lye. Next, mix the liquid with a few drops of your favourite scent or add seeds such as chia seeds for an exfoliating effect. Once the mixture has been left to set for around an hour, you can remove the finished blocks of soap.
Despite some scepticism, initial testers confirmed that the soaps smell like their chosen scent rather than leftover food. The soap's colourful appearance and sleek, square shape also impressed.
Graduate Danielle designed Sápu in response to a brief from the innovation department at British department store John Lewis. Students were tasked with developing a proposal that makes use of untapped or neglected resources in the urban environment to address the challenges of climate change, population growth and dwindling resources.
The designer created an eco-friendly alternative to how waste oil is currently disposed of. The result impresses not only visually, but in its customisable end product. Danielle is currently working hard to launch Sápu on the market as soon as possible to motivate people to dispose of their waste correctly.
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