04 February 2010
Fran Roberts likes to cook and all her family members and friends know it. When it comes to fried turkeys, she is their go-to person. Ditto for the fried chicken and the pork chops, too. “I do a lot of cooking for the family,” she said. “I cook Southern. I also take on other flairs and flavors.”
But with all that cooking, Roberts ends up with lots of used cooking oil and no easy way to dispose of it safely.“A fried turkey takes five gallons of oil,” she said.
When she could, Roberts drove from her rural Lithonia home into the city of Decatur to drop off her used oil at a recycling place. When she couldn’t, she dug a ho le on her large property, filled it up with trash, and poured in the oil.
But she was never comfortable with that option.
“I was annoyed,” Roberts said. “I felt that it gets in the ecosystem and wasn’t good for the ground.”
Now Roberts and other DeKalb and Fulton homeowners have a choice.
Green Grease LLC, a Lithonia-based company that partners with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Waste Wise program, is offering free pickup of used cooking oil from homes and apartment communities.
The company recycles the cooking oil into clean-burning biodiesel fuel for use in trucks and buses.
Warren Crawley, who launched Green Grease in the spring of 2008, says that instead of dumping used cooking oil down the kitchen drain or putting it into the trash where it ends up in the landfill, home owners can now call them to pick it up.
Roberts signed up for the free service in December, just before she began all her holiday cooking.
“This is really, really good,” she said Wednesday. “They give me buckets. I fill ’em up and they come and get them. It’s extremely convenient.”
Crawley says Roberts’ is one of nearly 1,000 single-family homes and 6,000 apartment units he now serves in metro Atlanta.
Together they are recycling 5,000 gallons of cooking oil a month.
Statewide, Crawley estimates that more than 500,000 gallons of used cooking oil is poured down pipes in household drains and dumped into landfills monthly.
DeKalb County’s “No Fog No Clog” campaign seeks to build awareness about disposal of fats, oil and grease in the sewer pipes. The county says they enter the plumbing system through the kitchen sink, home garbage disposals and toilets; coat the inside of plumbing pipes; and empty into the county’s sewer system, causing sanitary sewer overflow that backs up wastewater into homes, busin esses and manholes.
Before he launched his oil recycling business, Crawley was a building contractor when the housing market tanked.
He got into the cooking oil recycling business quite by accident.
In 2007, he said he was looking over his receipts for diesel fuel for the trucks he used in his building business and discovered that he had spent $12,000 on fuel.
That was when his then 16-year-old son, Warren II, suggested that he consider using biodiesel fuel by recycling the family’s and neighbors’ used cooking oils.
While restaurants and other commercial and institutional establishments must follow EPA guidelines for disposing of their oils, no such requirements exist for residential users of cooking oil, and Crawley found out that there are no companies that will pick up used oils from residences.
Crawley started out just collecting his family’s and his neighbors’ used cooking oils and bought a kit f or converting cooking oil into biodiesel fuels for his trucks. He said that each gallon of oil yields a gallon of clean-burning fuel.
Next he began surveying people about what they were doing with their used cooking oil.
“They told us that they did one of four things,” he said. “They poured it down the drain with hot water, they put in down their toilet and flushed, they put it in bottles in the trash, or they poured it in the back yard.”
Pouring cooking grease in the drains clogs county sewers and putting it in the trash sends it to the landfill. In the back yard, it contaminates the ground and attracts rodents.
Green Grease offers families a convenient and guilt-free way to dispose of their grease with no harm to the environment.
Residential customers pay a one-time $10 registration fee and get a 1.25 gallon spill-proof container with childproof caps for their used cooking oils. When the bucket is full, they c all Crawley and place their Green Grease containers at the home’s curbside. If entire subdivisions or apartment complexes sign up, Crawley said they get a monthly pickup day.
Crawley now has 20 salespeople who get $4 out of each registration fee. He said his salespeople are making $300 to $400 a day, signing up new customers.
Based upon current responses, he expects more than 150,000 homes will sign up with Green Grease by the end of the year.
He is negotiating to purchase a 10-acre site with a 27,000-square-foot building on Stone Mountain-Lithonia Road in Lithonia to open a biodiesel conversion facility.
For more information or to sign up, visit www.greengrease.info or call 404-736-3692.
Article by by jennifer Ffrench Parker
From CrossRoads News: http://crossroadsnews.com/bookmark/5700358
