Racing cars taking off with recycling oil

.A.S.A. Abfall Service AG and Puralube trim secondary raw material for racing sports.

The partners are intensifying their cooperation in material recycling of used oil, .A.S.A. Group is aiming for market leadership in this field in CEE.

Vienna, August 2012. .A.S.A. Abfall Service AG, the largest waste management company in CEE with headquarters in Himberg near Vienna, and Puralube, the German market leader in used oil recycling, are strengthening their cooperation. Used oil from Austria is limbered up by .A.S.A. in the Puralube refinery near Leipzig, to be further used under the highest quality requirements, as it is the case in motor sports.

During such races as ADAC GT Masters which took place in August at Red Bull Ring in Spielberg “secondary raw material in their engine” awards the racing team “wings”. .A.S.A. and Puralube would like to increasingly focus on the developments in the automotive industry and to push the use of high-quality recycled oils. The companies plan to become the market leader in material recycling of used oil in CEE.

Crude oil is running short; thanks to innovative technologies, used oil can be distilled today into the highest quality base oil and used in the production of lubricants for modern, efficient combustion engines. At the same time, the energy consumption is only half of that needed for the production of lubricants from crude oil. Up to 0.7 liters of “new” base oil can be produced from 1 liter of used oil and is being used for engine, transmission and hydraulic oils. The quality is often better than that of base oils derived from crude oil.

Around 3 million tons of used oil is collected In the European Union each year; however, more than half of the collected amount is incinerated instead of being recycled. In Austria, more than 40,000 tons of used oil is collected annually, already 11,000 tons of this quantity is recycled by the market leader .A.S.A. “Recycling should be the rule. The secondary raw material used oil is too valuable to be incinerated. Our clear goal is to become the market leader in material recycling of used oil in Central and Eastern Europe,” says Dr. Bertram Laub from the .A.S.A. Group.

.A.S.A. Group, based in Himberg near Vienna, is the largest waste management company in the CEE region, with a turnover of 377 million euros in 2011. The company employs approximately 4,400 people, 3,800 of them in Eastern Europe. In 2011, the .A.S.A. Group was able to recycle a total of approximately 500.000 tons of waste (so called secondary raw materials such as paper, plastics, wood, used clothes, metals, refuse-derived fuels, fats, mineral oils) and sell to industrial companies as secondary raw materials.

With its capacity of 160.000 tons per year, Puralube is a German market leader in material recycling of used oils. “By 2014 we will have expanded our capacity by half,” says Jens Wendland, a used oil specialist from Puralube. “We will be able to reprocess 240,000 tons of used oil into high quality base oils, to be used, among other things, as transmission or engine oil.” The start of this expansion stage is planed for May 2013 and the start of operation for the mid of 2014. The investment costs will amount to 54 million euro.