The first "gutter oil" monitoring system of its kind in the country has been put into operation at a high-end residential community in Pudong New Area, in a bid to further prevent illegal cooking oils from reaching dinner tables, Shanghai authorities said Wednesday.

At the 19,000-square-meter Jin Qiao Green Leisure Centre, 30 restaurants are using the 20,000 yuan ($3,140)-device, also called an oil-mist separator. It essentially works to filter a restaurant's wastewater from oil and grease before allowing the wastewater to enter the city's sewage system - where gutter oil is gathered for resale on the black market.

"With a 99.76-percent separation rate, the devices will make it hard for people to find gutter oil in sewers," said Zhang Jian, general manager of Wandi Environmental Technology Company, which produced the device for the Pudong community under a government subsidy. "Linked to a central system, they also have a GPS that allows gutter oil to be followed while detecting for irregularities - in real-time."

The double-locked barrels, meanwhile, which are used to collect gutter oil, are also equipped with a GPS, as are the licensed trucks used to transport the used cooking oils to processing plants, said Gu Zhenhua, deputy director of Shanghai Food Safety Office.

"The system enables officers to know exactly where the gutter oil is at all times, before arriving at the city's processing plants, where it's turned into biodiesel," he told the Global Times Wednesday. "But, it does come at a price."

Gu declined to disclose the system's operating costs Wednesday, but expressed concern that the expenses could challenge a citywide adoption of it, even despite a new regulation made last year, which requires mid to large-sized restaurants to use such a device by the end of the month - a rule that remaining eateries in the city are also supposed to fall in line with by the end of the year.

Like elsewhere in the country, Shanghai has long been plagued by gutter oil problems. Its some 40,000 licensed restaurants produce roughly 100 tons of waste cooking oil per day, but less than a third of it is properly managed, according to local media reports.

Although the city used to promote a gutter oil recycling system in 2006, only as much as 40 percent was ever processed, which left some 60 percent of it behind in sewers for illegal dealers, said Dai Xingyi, director of Fudan University's Center for Urban Environmental Management Studies.

"Shanghai has been a leader in gutter oil management, and this system is another example of that," he told the Global Times Wednesday. "But, it won't work for small eateries that can't afford the high costs - something needs to be done about that."