One of These Is Worth Something

The two categories

EPA’s material separates yellow grease — unadulterated spent fats and oils from deep fryers — from brown grease, meaning the floatable material and settled solids retained by a grease interceptor.

The words are industry usage rather than regulation, but the split is real and the handling is completely different.

Source: U.S. EPA, FOG Management and Control Program.

Why yellow is kept separate

Because clean fryer oil is a feedstock with buyers. It has a collection arrangement of its own, usually a sealed container at the back of the building and a renderer who services it.

Unadulterated is the operative word. Once it is mixed with wash water, food solids or trap contents it is no longer yellow grease and it is no longer worth anything.

What brown grease is

What a vessel holds: the floating layer, the settled solids and the water between them. It is a waste to be removed, hauled and disposed of by somebody permitted to do it, and the ticket you get back is a compliance record.

What has to be on that ticket.

The mistake that costs twice

Pouring fryer oil down a sink. It converts a material somebody would have collected into a load on the device that has to be pumped out and paid for, and it is exactly the input a grease program is trying to eliminate.

EPA’s figure for what a single restaurant produces gives a sense of the scale involved.

A twenty-fold spread, which says as much about how differently kitchens are run as it does about their size.

Source: U.S. EPA, Fats, Oils and Grease from food service establishments, EPA-833-F-12-003.

And why the sewer cares

Grease reaching the collection system solidifies, reduces conveyance capacity and blocks flow, and EPA attributes 47 percent of reported blockages to it.

That figure is the reason the whole apparatus — the ordinance, the device, the inspection, the manifest — exists at all.

• The local rule
• The paperwork