The chairman of the Nishida Shoun transport firm in Japan, Masumi Nishida, has come up with a method to power the firm’s vehicles using — using leftover tonkatsu ramen soup broth. The bio-diesel made from left-over ramen broth is a good substitute for renewable resources. The firm does this by mixing lard extracted from the broth, which is made from pork bones, with a fuel made from waste cooking oil. While the firm has already started using biodiesel oil in some of its 170 trucks, it plans to use the fuel in all the vehicles by September. According to Kyodo News, Masumi had come up with this idea in 2013 when a ramen chain operator had approached him saying that he had to pay for the disposal of leftover broth and wondered if it could be put to use instead.

74-year-old Masumi then developed a device that separates lard from the broth. Although lard has the tendency to solidify easily, Masumi devised a way to eliminate certain elements during the refining process in order to mix it easily with biodiesel fuel made from waste cooking oil.

Masumi told Kyodo News, “At the beginning, I had no knowledge of chemistry and it was all about trial and error. But my development saw the light of day when environmental issues are becoming a big challenge."

Nishida Shoun, which is based in Fukuoka Prefecture, buys lard and waste cooking oil from around 2,000 restaurants to produce about 3,000 litres of fuel each day at its plant in the prefecture. Recently, German scientists developed a plant oil-based plastic that can be recycled up to 10 times for use. Developed by Stefan Mecking, department chair of chemical materials science at the University of Konstanz in Germany, the new plastic has breakaway points engineered on a molecular level to allow easy processing. The findings of the research have been published in the scientific journal Nature.

This Japanese Firm is Making Biodiesel from Leftover Ramen Broth

Masumi Nishida had come up with this idea in 2013 when a ramen chain operator had approached him saying that he had to pay for the disposal of leftover broth and wondered if it could be put to use instead.