Technically you could reuse oil absorbents.

Some companies do reuse oil absorbents by separating the used oil absorbent from the unused absorbent.

Many organic absorbents will clump when used allowing the finer, unused material to be sieved off.

You would then need to dispose of the used product and put the unused material back in the spill kit.

In practice most people don’t reuse oil absorbents because of safety concerns.

In practise it is far more efficient and safer  to use less of the oil absorbent initially and then add extra if you need to and here’s why:

• Any absorbent will take on the characteristics of the material it was  used to absorb.
• If you soak up a volatile liquid such as petrol or  diesel the absorbent / fuel mix will burn more easily than the absorbent alone.
• Cheap mineral based ‘kitty litter’ absorbents mixed with fuel are  the worst. They are even more likely to burn as they adsorb.  Adsorb means the liquid sticks to the outside of the kitty litter and  is not soaked into the ‘kitty litter’ because mineral based ‘kitty  litter’ sorbents are made of hard sand like materials.
• Adsorbing a liquid leaves  it exposed to any flame and allows it to volatilize (turn into a gas) easily.

Volatile liquids such as fuel will also give off explosive gases even if an absorbent is used. Admittedly a good absorbent will  reduce vitalization but it won’t stop it altogether. Reusing oil absorbents means partially used absorbent could easily be put back into a storage container and , in my opinion,  could potentially be very dangerous. The gases formed will be poisonous and are potentially explosive. You also have to consider the possibility  of spontaneous combustion or combustion / explosion if there is exposure to naked flame or cigarette. Given all to many ‘wheelie bin’  spill kits are used as rubbish bins it is a very real threat that  someone will throw in a cigarette into a wheelie bin spill kit from time to time and if used absorbent is present you may well have a safety issue.

Best practice OH&S would train staff to start with less absorbent, use it all up and add more to finish if required. Then you would dispose of the lot even if it isn’t all used up thus avoiding any contamination in the spill kit.

One other thing that may interest you. Studies over the years in  regards to the costs of spill clean up show that the most of the cost is  not due to the absorbent material used. If an absorbent such as  Absorbent 15 is used on a typical spill of 1 liter you need less than 300 grams  (cost $0.60). The bloke to clean the spill on the other hand gets $25 an  hour and let’s say it takes him 10 minutes so it costs $4.16 in labor  and then there is losses in production. The bigger the facility the  bigger the cost in terms of  labor time and lost production.

For a typical road accident the cost of road clean up teams, traffic  controllers, machinery etc usually adds up to over 96-98% of the cost.  The actual absorbent cost is usually less than 4% of the total clean-up  bill.

The other question we are often asked is:

Can you burn used oil absorbents or get the oil out of them thus turning a waste into a useful product?

Good organic absorbents will burn and yield less than 4% ash but unfortunately the cost to gather up all the small amounts and transport them to say a brick kiln, where it could be burned, is too great. In practise it would take more energy in gathering and transporting these small amounts than burning would yield. That said some very large mines do use organic absorbents as a fuel source in their power generating plants.

As for extracting the oil again the energy required to extract and purify outweighs the amount of energy you could obtain from the waste.