Comment by pavel_lishin
1 day ago
Isn't that like being wowed by people who pay to have their car oil changed, instead of doing it themselves?
1 day ago
Isn't that like being wowed by people who pay to have their car oil changed, instead of doing it themselves?
Bad analogy imo given doing it yourself isn't that much cheaper and clicking "install extension" isn't exactly a complex maintenance operation
Yes, plus I wonder how "responsibly" do people who replace their car oil, dispose the old oil. One of the reasons I don't do it myself, is.. 'what the hell do I do with the old oil?' I know someone that parks/aims right over a grill that is there for the rain water, and all the bad/old oil goes straight there. I ain't no angel, but that person is an absolute cunt.
So.. I really hope that the garages that throughout my car-ownership years do this, don't just flush them down the toilet, but do something proper about them.
I do some maintenance myself but not oil changes - mostly from a time/cost perspective, I don’t really wish to go down that road and deal with spills in my driveway, etc. However the oil collection part isn’t particularly hard around here. I don’t know if there’s something similar in the US (or wherever you are located) but in Canada we have UOMA (Used Oil Management Association), a nonprofit which partners with garages to coordinate the recycling of used oil and related byproducts. They have a handy map which shows me 5+ garages in a 10min radius from my place which participates, including the shop I already go to - and I’m in a medium sized agricultural town, surrounded by corn fields, an hour from the nearest metropolitan area.
I was curious about what they did with oil when I drove my first car, so I asked my garage. They showed me the tank behind the shop, someone came to empty it once a week or so. I always assumed that was the usual practice, but I legitimately have no idea haha.
In my town, UK, you go to the local landfill and there is a tank to pour it in.
I just leave it in the shed in the bottle until I have enough other stuff to get rid of and do it all at once.
For what it's worth, where I live in New Jersey, automotive shops have to accept used oil - precisely to avoid this sort of issue. (And I trust that someone, somewhere is making sure that all of their oil actually goes somewhere safe, instead of - as you point out - being dumped into the ocean.)
I still don't change my own oil, because I'm at the point in my life where I can afford to throw $100 at that particular problem, rather than spending a dirty and greasy hour+ under my car.