Many a turkey met a delectable fate yesterday as they were dipped in hot oil and fried up GBD – golden, brown and delicious. Well, you might want to add green to that equation, as the leftover fryer oil can be turned into biodiesel. Many cities and communities across the country are offering to take that used fryer oil off your hands and make it into the green fuel. In Chicago, that city’s newspaper, the Tribune, had this article about the recycling efforts there, which also keeps that unwanted grease out of the sewer system.
On Saturday, 19 suburbs in DuPage and Cook counties will collect used cooking oil to convert it to clean-burning biofuel. School & Community Assistance for Recycling & Composting Education, or SCARCE, a Glen Ellyn-based environmental education nonprofit, organized the collection with oil recyclers Green Grease Environmental and Chicago Biofuels…
Green Grease Environmental and Chicago Biofuels will turn the used oil into biofuel and reimburse cities 50 cents for every gallon if they collect enough to cover expenses, said Mark Donahue, owner of Green Grease Environmental…
When oil gets into sewers, it sticks to pipe walls, creating clogs and backups that are expensive for cities and homeowners to fix, said Jim Holzapfel, public utilities director for water and wastewater for of Naperville, which will have two used cooking oil collection sites.
Sometimes the buildup gets out of control, like when a 16-ton lump of congealed grease and oil was discovered in London’s sewers in July. According to a statement from Thames Water, the utility company that manages the sewers, the bus-sized lard blob, or “fatberg,” reduced the pipe to 5 percent of its normal capacity and could have flooded streets and homes with sewage.
While your town might not experience its own 16-ton “fatberg,” you’ve got a chance to give your waste grease new life as biodiesel. Check your local area to see who will be collecting or where you can drop it off.