If you’ve been following our blog for some time, you’ll know that grease should never be poured down the drain because it causes blockages and can damage pipes. What, then, should be done with leftover grease from cooking? When you say “grease recycling,” what do you mean?
We’re glad you asked!
There are many ways you can either dispose of or recycle cooking grease, and in this article we will go over a few of those ways so you can get a better idea of what to do with that leftover grease after a barbecue or a good deep fry.
1. Reuse It
Believe it or not, cooking grease can be reused! There are a number of ways to clean it from any gunk from your previous cooking adventure or you can use it the way it is and add that extra barbecue flavor to your next dish. You can clean it by straining it through a coffee filter or adding some gelatin to it and letting it sit, covered, in the fridge for several hours; the clean oil will then rise to the surface of the mixture and the gunk will remain at the bottom. Clean oil can last for some time in the fridge, but oil that still has cooking gunks in it needs to be used within a few days. Reusing oil is an excellent way to both save grocery money and protect your pipes and the environment from unnecessary oil waste.
2. Bottle It Up
If you are not into the idea of reusing oil or you just want a quick way to deal with the oil, you can certainly throw it out. Make sure to pour the oil into a sealed bottle or container before tossing it into the trash so it doesn’t escape all over your garbage and possibly even leak out.
You can also bottle up your oil in order to recycle it. Many grease recycling companies don’t collect oil from residential homes, but you can drop off your grease once you have it contained in a sealed receptacle. Many people who do this keep bottled used cooking grease in their garage or some other out-of-the-way storage area until they have a number of containers to drop off at once.
3. Call a Grease Recycling Company
If you work in a commercial kitchen such as in a restaurant, nursing home, hospital, or hotel, you can call a grease recycling or grease hauling company to take away your excess cooking grease. These companies will send a truck that is designated for grease collection and will bring your grease, along with the grease of many others, to the recycling plant where the grease will be turned into fuel, cosmetics, candles, soaps, and even used in animal feed.
At A&L Cesspool, we will both clean your grease traps and take care of hauling away your excess grease to a grease recycling plant. If you do experience a clog in your sewer pipes due to grease buildup, we can help with that, too!