There exist a few companies in South Africa that refines glycerine into either technical or pharmaceutical grade from imported crude glycerine derived from biodiesel plants overseas for about R3000 per ton. The content of the imported glycerine is a minimum of 80% glycerol, salt content of about 8%, MONG (matter, organic, non-glycerol) content of 1% with the remaining fraction being water.
The glycerine produced by South African biodiesel producers using used cooking oil as feedstock is not to the same standard as the imported glycerine produced by the large commercial scale biodiesel plants abroad. The local glycerine refineries therefore do not want to process glycerine from the South African biodiesel producers which consists of methanol content from between zero and 30%, glycerol content of as low as 20% up to 60%, soap content of up to 60% and salt content of up to 8%.

The reason for the high soap content and the low glycerol content is because used oil contains FFA (free fatty acids) of up to 8% which is turned into soap in the biodiesel (transesterification) process. The pure glycerol produced in the biodiesel process is stoichometrically about 10% but the actual crude glycerol by-product is between 12% and 25% of the biodiesel mass due to the salts, soaps and methanol present in the crude glycerol.
The main drive behind this initiative is to absorb the low quality crude glycerine produced by used cooking oil plants and produce pharmaceutical grade glycerine.

BIONEER has developed a process to purify crude glycerol into 98% pure technical grade glycerol!