A Tokyo startup has some ambitious plans to turn what's left over from cooking tempura and other deep-fried dishes into sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF.

Ecolio now produces about 200 tons of a raw material that goes into SAF annually. The basis of the material is the flakes that remain from deep frying at restaurants and supermarkets.

The company aims to expand its output to about 200,000 tons a year.

Machines developed by Ecolio compress the deep-fried flakes on-site. The oil gets reused for cooking. But the solids go through a heating process and compression to turn them into the raw material for SAF.

The leftover flakes can be at risk of spontaneous combustion so are normally processed as industrial waste.

But the company says its equipment allows them to be collected safely.

Ecolio's president Urano Yukio says: "Fried flakes are usually discarded but can actually be seen as unused raw materials. So I think there are many potential uses for them in Japan as well as overseas."

Urano says the company plans to expand its operations by joining hands with many more suppliers.