What to Know About Grease Recycling

If you run a restaurant, you know that grease trap maintenance is important. Not only is it legally mandated for most places, but it's also important to keep grease out of your pipe system as well as the city's pipe systems. But it's another expense you have to deal with, and you know that just throwing away grease in normal trash cans is probably not that great for the environment.

Is there a solution? Find a grease recycling service. Many of them will give you money for your old cooking oil, which can help offset the costs of grease maintenance. They'll then refine your used grease into useful things that can be resold. This process is better for the environment.

If you do not run a restaurant and you're just a home cook, you can still sell your old cooking oil to grease recycling facilities. The availability is more limited, but more businesses are trying to open up their options because it's still potentially damaging to pipes to pour grease down the sink. This means you can take them the oil you used to fry your turkey in last Thanksgiving, and maybe it'll help offset the cost of frying your turkey next Thanksgiving. Other services won't pay for the oil but will offer quick and easy drop off services that mean you can handle dropping your used cooking oil off during your other errands.

The grease will be shipped off and then refined, mostly into bio-diesel. The bits that cannot be refined into something usable will be composted, which will allow it to decompose quickly and then be useful for soil conditioning. There are other byproducts besides bio-diesel that can be formed of your old grease: salt and glycerin can be extracted and reused. Sometimes it's used in the production of animal feed, among other things.

For restaurants, some of these grease recycling services may need to install special collection equipment on-site, so be sure to ask them what they need and talk about plans for how best to integrate this equipment into your facility without impacting your staff or guests.

Doing this may even give you a selling point with certain types of potential customers. If you can state that you are being responsible for your grease collection and are having it recycled, you could get more attention from the more eco-friendly of your potential customer base. They might choose to frequent your restaurant more often.