What could be more heartwarming than the sight of a table groaning with glistening Thanksgiving turkey, candied yams and buttery brussel sprouts or green beans? Still, all of that succulence is balanced by chaos and mess in the kitchen, where towers of plates, pans, and pots also glisten with the day?s accumulation of oil and grease. After an afternoon sweating over turkey and plying argumentative relatives with food and drink, you find your sink strainer or your garbage disposal doing double duty.
Most of us tend to pour the oil directly down the drain. A quick wash with dish liquid convinces us that we?re breaking down the fat sufficiently.
Unfortunately, that?s when the work might begin for the plumber. Fat, oil and grease (FOG) poured down a drain will eventually cool, clinging to the sides of pipes and making it harder for water to flow through the vast arterial networks underground. Soap doesn?t help to fully break down the sludge either, because fat, oil, and grease like to regroup further down the pipe.
Ultimately, this can burden the city?s sewer system, leading to overflows that have environmental impacts on streets and rivers further down the line.
But some people are aware that our Thanksgiving effluent has potential as biofuel. And as it turns out, several cities across the United States are running public or privately run FOG recycling drives.
Many are aimed at restaurants, which continually churn out grease and oil. Others are intended to help residents deal with FOG-saturated events like Thanksgiving or Christmas. Most require participants to pour cooled oil or scrape congealed fat and grease into plastic food storage containers for delivery or collection.
In San Francisco, a number of drop-off sites at grocery stores and other businesses will accept residents? tubs of grease. In Tucson, Ariz., Pima County is offering day-after grease drop-off facilities for an eighth year running. Over the length of the program, it has collected over 18 000 pounds of FOG for reuse as biodiesel.
A recycling team named Green Grease offers home pickups in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi and Michigan. And that?s just a sampling.
New York City offers a list of grease recyclers, although it is mainly intended for local businesses, which face state penalties of up to $10,000 if they dump grease down drains. For individual consumers, the possibilities are less clear: the New York City Department of Environmental Protection suggests that oil, grease and fat be placed in nonrecyclable containers and then dumped in the trash for regular collection.
The ultimate goal is to reduce instances of sewer clogging so that toxic overflows are less of a threat. But when city programs are lacking, some people have turned to their own devices to make fuel from their cooking waste. (No tutorial here: it?s a little complicated.)
Bird to biodiesel: maybe you?ll want to save the thought for tomorrow, when you?ve finished digesting the feast.
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