(HealthDayNews) -- Put a little too much oil in your salad? Never mind: Recycle it as a lubricant for a skateboard, bike or even a door hinge. That was the conclusion of Joseph Mazzella earlier this year, when he experimented with uncommon uses for cooking oils as a project for the California State Science Fair.
Meanwhile, a doctoral candidate at Penn State University was reporting that many vegetable-derived cooking and salad oils, such as corn, sunflower and canola, "can be made to perform as well or better than the commercial standard for car, boat and machine lubricants," according to a University press release.
Mazzella, an eighth grade student at Maris Academy, La Jolla, CA, noted in the abstract for his project that cooking oils used to be used as lubricants, but because they broke down "under immense heat and pressure," that usage was halted during the 19th century.
The Penn State study aimed at reviving that use found that, to make the cooking oils more stable under heat and pressure, it was necessary to blend them with "a proprietary additive developed at Penn State." When the formulation was right, the cooking oil concoctions would "perform as well or better than the commercial standard, 10W-30 SG" under many standard tests, doctoral candidate Svajus Asadauskas reported.
