Grease is the word of a new industry
Rick Montgomery | KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Issue date: 3/31/04 Section: News
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KANSAS CITY‚ Mo. (KRT) - Set down the forkful of sausages and ponder, if you will, the grease log.
In the sewer trade, the grease log terrorizes. It grows, forming white and rubbery in wastewater lines outside restaurants and beneath residential kitchens, the cumulative ick from America's affair with fat.
In time, the log will clog.
"It can pop a manhole cover," said Colleen Newman‚ of the Kansas City Water Services Department.
Hardened cooking grease, sometimes filling three or four feet of a section of sewer pipe, caused at least 117 public overflows in Kansas City last year.
A culture of supersized fries has produced supersized grease, millions of tons of it each year. Some of the goop slithers down the drain. At fast-food joints, most of the deep-fat grease gets pumped into tanker trucks to be recycled into animal feed. Barrels of used kitchen grease are shipped to South America to make soap and cosmetics. And, increasingly, spent vegetable oil is being converted into fuel to power diesel engines.
"Cooking grease. It's a whole new industry," said Jim Channell, an Illinois buyer of fats and oils on the open exchange.
This is not your grandmother's grease - the throwaway gunk nobody wanted to touch. Now we have grease researchers, grease merchants, grease thieves. Kansas City, in recent years, hired its own Oil and Grease Program coordinator to attack the sewer pileups and to educate or fine restaurateurs.
The program's slogan: "Don't feed the Grease Goblin!" But they do. They make grease logs. In the cool, damp embrace of a sanitary sewer line, "a grease log develops in layers," Leon Holt said. "Sort of like a pearl being formed inside an oyster."
Holt, the utility pretreatment coordinator for the city of Cary‚ N.C., gives PowerPoint presentations on the topic. When sewer crews in North Carolina confront a grease-related backup, they call Holt.
"They'll say, 'Leon‚ got another chunk of grease for you,'" Holt said. "It might be the size of a volleyball ... I don't know, maybe three pounds."
In the sewer trade, the grease log terrorizes. It grows, forming white and rubbery in wastewater lines outside restaurants and beneath residential kitchens, the cumulative ick from America's affair with fat.
In time, the log will clog.
"It can pop a manhole cover," said Colleen Newman‚ of the Kansas City Water Services Department.
Hardened cooking grease, sometimes filling three or four feet of a section of sewer pipe, caused at least 117 public overflows in Kansas City last year.
A culture of supersized fries has produced supersized grease, millions of tons of it each year. Some of the goop slithers down the drain. At fast-food joints, most of the deep-fat grease gets pumped into tanker trucks to be recycled into animal feed. Barrels of used kitchen grease are shipped to South America to make soap and cosmetics. And, increasingly, spent vegetable oil is being converted into fuel to power diesel engines.
"Cooking grease. It's a whole new industry," said Jim Channell, an Illinois buyer of fats and oils on the open exchange.
This is not your grandmother's grease - the throwaway gunk nobody wanted to touch. Now we have grease researchers, grease merchants, grease thieves. Kansas City, in recent years, hired its own Oil and Grease Program coordinator to attack the sewer pileups and to educate or fine restaurateurs.
The program's slogan: "Don't feed the Grease Goblin!" But they do. They make grease logs. In the cool, damp embrace of a sanitary sewer line, "a grease log develops in layers," Leon Holt said. "Sort of like a pearl being formed inside an oyster."
Holt, the utility pretreatment coordinator for the city of Cary‚ N.C., gives PowerPoint presentations on the topic. When sewer crews in North Carolina confront a grease-related backup, they call Holt.
"They'll say, 'Leon‚ got another chunk of grease for you,'" Holt said. "It might be the size of a volleyball ... I don't know, maybe three pounds."