Outboard Motor Oil

Through several posts on this blog, we’ve stressed the importance of recycling your outboard motor oil.  One of the biggest concerns is where to find your local recycling station.  There are several ways to do this.

The easiest way to do it is to check your local phone book. You can also check your county or city’s website to find locations.  If none of those resources work out, you could also consult an auto mechanic, as they would know where to recycle your oil.

If you own or operate a sailboat, commercial fishing vessel, or recreational powerboat, now you can keep our waterways clean by properly managing your oily bilge water for free! Oily bilge water pump out stations have been installed at many marinas and lakes for the public to use, and oil absorbent pads are often available for free to help absorb boat motor oil contamination in your bilge water or to clean up any accidental spills safely and efficiently. Plus, oil and oil pad collection stations are conveniently located to ensure your used oil get recycled into new products.

It only takes a few minutes to pump out your bilge and keep our waterways and drinking water clean! All the oil captured by these systems is recycled, the water filtered and returned to our waterways free of contamination.

Clean Water: By recycling your used outboard motor oil, you keep it out of rivers, lakes, streams and even your ground water. In many cases, that means keeping it out of your drinking water, off our beaches and away from wildlife.

Recycling the motor oil from one oil change protects a million gallons of drinking water - or a year’s supply for 50 people.

Save Energy and a Resource: Motor oil doesn’t wear out – it just gets dirty. As it circulates through your engine it picks up a variety of contaminants and becomes dirty or used and needs to be replaced. If you are one of the millions of do-it-yourselfers who drops off your oil at a collections center or uses curbside pickup you are conserving energy for future generations.

If one gallon of used motor oil is reprocessed and burned as fuel, it will generate enough electricity to power everything in your home for a day.

Recycling Used Oil: Used motor oil can be reprocessed into fuel that warms your home in the winter and cools it in the summer. It can be burned in furnaces for heat, or in power plants to generate electricity for homes, schools and businesses. Processed motor oil can also be used in industrial burners, mixed with asphalts for paving, or blended for marine fuels.

Used motor oil can be re-refined into lubricating oils that meets the same certification and specifications as new or virgin motor oil thus conserving energy resources for the future.

Today oil prices surged, yet again, to $127 a barrel. On the heels of this news are the concerns that oil prices will not go down as Memorial Day weekend (the unofficial first day of summer travel) looms closely. That said, outboard motor oil prices are also scheduled for a slight price increase. Do yourself a favor and start buying oil for the summer now. Don’t wait around or you’ll be apt to spend your summer on land.

Recently I found that some of the motor oils I’ve been using have been more a detriment to my boat, often causing more problems eating more gas than anything else.  Then someone recommended that I switch to Yamalube.  Admittedly I was a bit reluctant, but I hedged on my feelings and tried it. 

Let me say that I thought Yamalube would only work well with Yamaha engines.  Those ill informed opinions aside, Yamalube made my boat run remarkably well.  Riding on the water was a smooth go, which is not an easy feat by any means.  It’s also quite affordable as I found a case of it for $83 online.

I thought it would take a huge arm twist to turn me into a convert, but all it really took in the end was a simple test drive and the ability to make my boat run well, as opposed to a gloried gondola.

I think there’s this misconception that those of us who use boats recreationally have a pile of money buried beneath their mattress.  I can’t say that I’ve ever had anything more than a stack of comic books and dirty laundry under my bed (when I was a kid), but I can tell you that a pile of money is something that I do not have.

Luckily, I can purchase a 16 gallon drum of Evinrude outboard motor oil for under $500 through domo-online.com.  It’s a perfect buy for a budget-minded consumer and boat enthusiast such as myself.  16 gallons may not seem like much, but there’s realistically a few weeks out of the year that I can take my boat out, so it works out in the end.

The Many Uses of Recycled Motor Oil

Recycling used outboard motor oil keeps oil out of landfills and ensures that this oil is available for re-use, reconditioning, reprocessing or re-refining.

From a purely environmental point of view, the best thing that the motor oil consumer can do is to buy a longer-lasting oil. In that way, less used oil is generated in the first place.

Over 380 million gallons of used oil is recycled each year according to the U.S. EPA, which equates to over 50 percent of all motor oil purchased annually.

Currently, used motor oil can be re-used or recycled one of three ways—reconditioning, reprocessing or re-refining. It is important to note that each process can be important in helping to manage the overall volume of used motor oil in the U.S.

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