From a mechanical point of view, the oil in your car does not break down. It simply gets dirty. Particles in the air get lodged in your oil, which increases its viscosity, or in other words, increases its thickness and friction, which causes wear and tear on the parts of your engine that are lubricated with the oil. After 5,000 miles of driving, you may have a lot of particles in your oil. There's nothing wrong with the oil itself. Oil doesn't break down in 5,000 miles, especially if it's synthetic. Your oil isn't bad, it's just dirty, and the truth of the matter is that your oil doesn't need to be changed; it just needs to be cleaned.
If you were to remove all the particles from that oil, leaving just the clean, pure oil that you put in your car in the first place, you could continue using that oil for a long period of time. Perhaps 50,000 miles, or 10 times longer than the average person goes on their oil. Now, you say, "Wait a minute, I already have an oil filter on my car. That should be cleaning the oil." Well, it does clean the oil to some extent, but it just filters out the larger particles. That doesn't clean your oil at a fine enough tolerance to render the oil as good as new. However, if you were to take the oil out of the car and clean it through a much better filter, then you could put that same oil back in your car and drive another 5,000 miles.
Of course, this is information that the petroleum industry doesn't want people to know. That's why most people find this to be a complete shock. They say, "What? I don't need to change my oil? I just need to clean it?" The petroleum industry wants to keep selling you more oil. Now, there are two problems with that. First, it's just basically dishonest, when in reality you don't need to change your oil; you just need to clean it. Secondly, it creates an environmental hazard because we have all this old, used oil being disposed of all around the country, and a lot of it ends up in landfills, or even in just regular household garbage. Some of it ends up poured into streams or rivers. Some people just pour it down the drain. So we have a huge oil disposal problem in this country, which creates a negative environmental impact. That impact could be largely avoided by reusing the same oil we already have in our cars.
The environmental impact of throwing away a dirty filter is far less than throwing away five quarts of oil. It's all about recycling. As much as we have people talking about recycling in this country, and all these recycling efforts and recycling programs, nobody is talking about recycling this oil, except a few smart companies that will reclaim used oil. They'll actually buy it from filling stations or landfills that collect oil. They'll cart it off, and guess what these companies do with this oil? They run it through a very fine filter. They clean the oil and resell it back to industrial users. It's recycled oil, and it's nearly as good as the new stuff.
If you've been thinking all along that you have to change the oil in your car because the oil is wearing out, you've been conned. The truth is, all you have to do is clean your oil, and then you can reuse it again. So how do you clean it? Unfortunately, there's no easy system for consumers to clean their own oil, but there is commercial equipment available that the oil recycling companies use. You see, the industry doesn't want people to know that they can clean their oil. There's no incentive for anybody from the petroleum industry to show you how to reuse the same oil over and over again.
But I'll give you a hint on how to do this yourself: If you're handy with mechanics, you can clean your own oil by pumping it under high pressure through a cellulose filtration device otherwise known as toilet paper. Check it out yourself at Ralph Wood Bypass Filters.
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