Industrial energy recovery from waste soup of ramen noodles is feasible, suggests a new study.
The study is: “The recovery of oil from a lot of oily wastewater and the production of biodiesel from its oil,” Chihiro Kondo, Hiroki Sano, Nobuki Ichimiya, Koji Yamane, and Kiyoshi Kawasaki, Transactions of the JSME, vol. 85, no. 874, 2019. The authors, at Okayama University of Science, Ridai-cho, and The University of Shiga Prefecture, Japan, report:
“This paper describes how to produce a biodiesel fuel (BDF) from the waste soup of ramen noodles, especially focusing on the recovery process of the oil (triglycerides) from a large amount of waste soup or the oily wastewater disposed of by pouring it down the sink by a ramen restaurant. By combining a semi-transparent bucket (~6 L) with a cock and solvent extraction, it is shown that oil can be recovered easily from 300 or more bowls of ramen noodle waste soup, with an energy profit ratio (EPR) of more than 5.2.”
(Thanks to Raymond Kunikane Terhune for bringing this to our attention.)
BONUS (only tangentially related): This video shows a more traditional, non-industrial, human-based method of extracting energy from ramen noodles waste soup: