Beijing, Nov 3 (IANS): A total of seven people in China's Hebei province have been awarded jail terms up to 15 years for manufacturing and selling "gutter oil", a recycled oil made from kitchen waste.

Four managers of a cooking oil firm in Xingtai city and three other employees were convicted for selling about 238 tonnes of dirty chicken salad oil for over 2 million yuan ( about $328,000) in 2011, Xinhua quoted the Nanhe County people's court as saying in its verdict Friday.

The unsafe edible oil was made from substandard chicken oil and animal oil used in animal feedstuff, the court said.

The four managers were each sentenced to 15 years in prison and fined a total of 1.2 million yuan while one of the staffers was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison and fined 50,000 yuan. The other two staffers were given two-year jail terms and ordered to pay a fine of 60,000 yuan each.

Gutter oil refers to the recycled oil made from kitchen waste dredged from gutters behind restaurants and other kinds of unsanitary animal oil. The oil is dangerous for consumption.