How to Recycle Used Oil and Other Fluids From Your Car Truck or SUV

Hey, Len, what are you doing here?

Just another oil change. You know how I do it. You know what, while I got you here, too many people ask me, "What do you do with the fluids when you're all done doing your oil change or servicing a vehicle?" Let's talk about it.

All right. So anytime you're working on a vehicle and you're dealing with fluids, especially if you're gonna be draining them in any way, it's super important to make sure that you recycle that fluid the way that the EPA recommends. You definitely don't want to let it get on the ground or soak into any streams or anything like that.

With that said, why not grab one of these buckets? It's great for collecting any of your used fluids and then, of course, you can recycle it as needed. Now, obviously, not everybody has one of those buckets and they're probably not always working on a lift. If you're working on the ground, you're probably gonna have a small bucket like this. If you have a small bucket, more than likely you're going to miss. Your ground might look a little bit more like this, which obviously is very bad. The last thing you want to do is contaminate mother nature.

All right, so let's get this bucket out of the way. And now we can see the ground. As you can tell, I made a very big mess. It's a great idea to use something like this, and this is gonna soak up any mess that I made. What I really want to do is get up every last bit of this. I'm going to get up as much as I can.

So now that I picked up the ground the best I could, it's important to remember that we need to dispose this oil properly, meaning recycle. Come on, follow me.

All right. So when it comes time to recycling your waste oil, I want to make sure that you understand that it's not necessarily just engine oil that we're talking about here. It's pretty much any other type of oil that you might have. Maybe some transmission fluid, power steering fluid, engine oil like I said, maybe even a little bit of rear differential fluid. Any of that is considered an oil and it can go in with your waste oil. That's just fine. To show you what I'm talking about, we have a jug that's specifically made just for waste oil. Nothing else goes in this except for, like I said, all that.

I would just open this up. I always keep it closed when I'm not using it. Got a nice funnel here. Take my waste oil. I'm gonna go ahead and funnel it right in there nice and easy. Once this is done, I'll just recap it up and I'll be on my way. Once it's done draining, make sure you cover it back up. You don't want anything getting in there, small children or anything messing around with anything. Perfect.

Okay. So now it's time to talk about the coolant. Like I said, we have a jug that's specific just for waste cooling. That means you don't want to go ahead and add any of this in there. I'm not even going to do it just to show you. All we would do, just lift this up, get one of these nice coolant jugs. This is the best because it has a little funnel. You can go ahead and put it right in there like that.

Once you've got that completely drained out, once again, make sure you have it completely covered so nothing can get in there that shouldn't be in there at all. Now with all that said, it's understandable that not everybody has a couple of these things laying around in their garage or shed. You go out, you do your oil change. Where are you going to put that oil? Well, maybe drain it back into one of these buckets.

You catch it inside that little pan and then you take your funnel, you put it in here, you fill this one up and then you fill up the next one and next one. And of course, if you had enough oil to put in there in the first place, more than likely, you're gonna have enough room inside those waste oil containers to be able to take care of it and then dispose of them properly.

Now you definitely don't want to put your waste oil down in the sewer. Absolutely not. And definitely not in the trashcan. Now with all that said, it's important to remember you don't want to just keep a whole bunch of these containers laying around up on your garage shelves and all that stuff because it's waste oil.

There are a whole bunch of places and then you can probably look it up online that are gonna take back your waste oil. More than likely wherever it was you bought the oil from in the first place is gonna take the oil back for you and they're going to recycle it properly.

Now, if you're constantly doing oil changes, it's probably a good idea to have a nice reusable container that'll hold all your oil so you can get it safely recycled.

Okay, friends, we had a little bit of fun making this video for you. Hopefully, you learned a little something along the way. If you got something to say, leave it in the comment section below. While you're at it, why don't you go ahead and smash on that like button, subscribe, and ring the bell? That way that you can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.

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