What to do with used engine oil?
Or what to do with five litres of old oil after changing it in your garage?
In this section: 8 articles
A familiar picture: you changed the oil yourself, in the garage, and did it all properly — clean, no draughts, engine covered. Fresh oil in the engine, and under the car a basin with five litres of black used oil, next to it the old filter and an “empty” can. And this is where the “helpful” advice starts: pour it down the drain, bury it behind the garage, give it to the neighbour to light his stove with, or better still soak the fence posts in it “so they don’t rot”. In fact, not one of these will do, and it isn’t only about the law.
Whether you should change oil in a garage at all I have already covered in the article on where and how it is best to change your oil. This one is about what is left over afterwards.
Why you can’t just pour it away
Used oil is no longer the oil that came out of the can. Over thousands of kilometres it has collected everything it was fighting in the engine: soot, oxidation products, fine metal particles from wearing parts, fuel residue and sometimes coolant as well.
Put simply, used oil is a concentrate of everything harmful that was in your engine. Poured on the ground, it does not disappear: it soaks into the soil and moves on with the rain into the groundwater, and from the sewer it ends up in a river. On water, oil spreads into a thin film over a huge area (remember the rainbow patches on the puddles outside a bad garage), and life under that film is hard for anything living.
Burn it? Even worse. In a stove or a home-made pot-bellied heater the oil, as a rule, does not burn completely, and everything it has collected (soot, metals, what is left of the additives) goes up the chimney and settles all around: on the neighbour’s vegetable patch and in his lungs. Burying it is the same as pouring it out, only with a delay. And fence posts soaked in used oil give it back, year after year, to the same soil.
What the rules say
Ukraine has a law “On Waste Management”, passed in 2022; it came into force on 9 July 2023 and replaced the old 1998 law “On Waste”. Its logic is European: first avoid waste, then reuse or recycle it, and only as a last resort dispose of it, with the polluter paying. Under this law, used engine oil is hazardous waste.
The separate procedure for handling used oils, which the government approved back in 2012 (with duties for manufacturers and importers and its own reporting), has been repealed: it ceased to apply on 30 June 2026. Used oil now falls under the general rules for hazardous waste, and that means one thing: only operators licensed to handle hazardous waste may collect, store and process it.
Ukraine, an EU candidate country since 23 June 2022, is step by step bringing its waste rules into line with Europe’s. In the EU the key document here is the Waste Framework Directive 2008/98/EC, and its Article 21 requires waste oils to be collected separately, kept apart from other waste and, above all, regenerated. In other words, used oil is turned back into base oil, the very foundation from which engine oil is then made. But only if nobody has mixed it with whatever came to hand.
Where to take it
1. The simplest way is not to deal with it at all. If the oil is changed at a service station or an oil-change point, the used oil stays there, and what happens to it next is the garage’s problem. One more argument for a workshop with a clean bay (if it really is clean, of course).
2. Changed it yourself? Arrange things in advance. Used oil is usually accepted by service stations that do oil changes themselves, or by a collection point of a licensed operator. But by no means every service station will take somebody else’s oil from a home garage, so ring first and ask. And there is nothing embarrassing about asking a collection point about its licence.
3. Don’t mix. Drain the oil into a clean can with a cap (the handiest is the one the fresh oil came in) and put nothing else in it: no antifreeze, no brake fluid, no petrol you washed the parts in. Oil mixed with other fluids is no longer feedstock for regeneration, just a more awkward kind of waste.
4. Take the filter and the can to the same place. A fair amount of used oil stays in the old oil filter, and in the “empty” can too. Let the filter drain over that same can, put it in a strong bag and take it along with the oil, not to the household rubbish bin.
And by the way, don’t give empty branded cans away to just anybody: counterfeiters need the packaging no less than the oil itself. When Ukraine’s Economic Security Bureau busted a large underground plant making fake engine oil in 2025, the haul included about 4,000 empty containers (how not to buy that kind of “product” is explained in how not to buy counterfeit oil). In time, cans will most likely be collected under an extended producer responsibility scheme: there is a draft law on packaging, but no such system is up and running yet.
So, as long as the oil is changed at a service station, the used oil is not your worry; if you drained it yourself, see it through to the end. Five litres in the boot is not that high a price for keeping the water in your well from smelling of your own engine.
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