Eco Friendly, Green Grease Disposal

I recently learned how to correctly dispose of our kitchen grease and / or cooking oil waste. While we rarely deep fry or use a lot of oil in our cooking, other folks aren’t the same. Grease should not be flushed down the sink with hot water, where it can clog up pipes and sewers.

How to Dispose of Grease Correctly

• One should collect kitchen grease in a metal can or jar and then bring it to a disposal site.
• Do not use foil lined paper containers like Crisco containers.
• It could then be trashed, where it will sit in the landfill but recycling it into biodiesel is better.
• Check with your local recycling program to see if they support this. San Francisco, EBMUD, and Palo Alto support grease recycling.

The manufacturers should put this on the label of Cooking Oil Jars…

Grease can make you money

If you own a restaurant, getting rid of grease used to be a costly and time consuming effort. Kitchen grease is now sold by restaurants to recyclers for $0.42 per pound. Green conscious people have retargeted this previously waste product into a fuel for cars. Roughly 7 years ago we met extremely environmentally conscious car owners who had converted their diesel automobiles to run on kitchen grease. They were the early adopters in this area. They used to visit different restaurants and retarget their grease waste. Their car’s exhaust might smell like a Thai restaurant one day, and a burger joint the next.

This price continues to climb as demand for bio diesel increases. Some people are even stealing grease drums now to make money! San Francisco has their own SF Greasecycle program for restaurants. Got Grease also handles grease recycling.

Power Your Restaurant With Waste Vegetable Oil

Own a restaurant? The new Vegawatt converts waste cooking oil into on-site electricity and hot water, saving your restaurant thousands of dollars as well as providing a clean, renewable source of energy. Their analysis shows a $814 monthly benefit – $435 cost to lease the unit.

This innovative unit takes used cooking oil and retargets it to produce useful energy. No need to pay to have people dispose of it. A win-win situation.

With the downturn causing many restaurants to close, it will probably be a while before we see widespread adoption of products like this. Perhaps this can be built on a larger scale and shared with many restaurants. It is great to know something like this exists.

Algae based Diesel Fuel

Toward the end of 2012, the first diesel fuel that included 20% algae, otherwise known as Biodiesel B20 started selling in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its price was similar to regular diesel fuel but it produces 30% fewer particulates, 20% less carbon monoxide, and 10% fewer hydrocarbons. The algae oil is made by Solazyme in Peoria, IL. While this fuel is only 20% non petroleum, it is a major step in the right direction.

Posted on September 5th, 2012
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