Category: News

Published: Wednesday, 17 April 2019 18:17

by Rebecca Tan

19th March 2019, Putrajaya – A candle making workshop was conducted by EcoKnights alongside with 32 participants from IOI Properties at Palm Tree Hotel in Putrajaya on a Tuesday morning. Through the workshop, the team showcased an easy way to make good use of a popular kitchen waste―used cooking oil. The good deed was done by transforming the oil to brand new candles.

As a starter, the EcoKnights team gave a small talk regarding the rising concern of the improper disposal of used cooking oil from our daily lives into sinks at households, and the illegal disposal of used oil from certain restaurants and companies into rivers and oceans. For this workshop, the used cooking oil were brought from kitchens of the hotel and from the participants’ houses. Some participants were shocked to see the amount of oil that were accumulated only over a day from the hotel kitchen itself. This gave the participants a topic to chew on and an insight on the alarming rate on the amount of used  cooking oil that could be dumped into rivers and oceans which is destructive to the aquatic ecosystems.

With some simple tools, materials, and everyone’s effort, the EcoKnights team and the participants were able to produce over 200 candles that would be use to light up the hotel during Earth Hour, which was on 31th of March 2019. During the process, participants were eager to understand how they can make a better change for the environment and they all agree that small steps like this should be taken first in order to make a bigger change. In the end of the day, everyone was glad that they are able to make some difference for aquatic ecosystems―by converting used cooking oil into candles!