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With rising biofuel production and growing demand for fryer grease, collectors who once charged restaurants to haul away grease are now often paying for it. But the fats, oils and greases, or FOG, that still get into drains are causing eateries and facility managers major headaches. Now that may be changing, too.
If you're sitting at your desk eating lunch while reading this, I'd suggest you not click on the upcoming link. Let's just say it won't aid your digestion. But if you can hack it, give this video a whirl. What you'll see is a live feed from inside a grease interceptor at the Montage Laguna Beach, a luxury resort in Laguna Beach, Calif. It's not what you'd expect to see there — and don't worry, this video is pulled from deep underground. But the company behind the camera, Grease Reduction Systems sees beauty in that image, because it shows what the firm contends is a major breakthrough in eliminating a decades-old problem: the build-up of fats, oils and grease that is flushed down building drains.
The Burden of FOG
The problems that FOG can cause are significant — as food service industry professionals know. No matter how well kitchen staff follow procedures for diverting pan drippings, food scraps and other oils, fats and greases into used cooking oil containers or waste bins, some of this stuff ends up going down the drain when equipment is cleaned. Then travels through a device called a grease trap or a grease interceptor, where the FOG is captured in a series of baffles while most of the water is flushed to sewage lines, bound for municipal wastewater treatment.
In a perfect world before the grease trap is filled to capacity, a waste collector (generally the same hauler that collects fryer grease — possibly for biofuel feedstock) is periodically called to clean out the grease trap and carry the FOG away in a tanker. The frequency of these visits is determined by municipal requirements, the size of the tank and the daily output of FOG. Businesses pay the collectors anywhere from $100 per visit to many hundreds.
Of course with the world being far from perfect, grease traps are sometimes not well maintained and overflow. When that happens, restaurants and building managers pay the price in high cleanup costs and fees — and the business's reputation takes a hit, too. Like it or not, restaurants, food production facilities, cafeterias, any building that produces food-based products are ultimately responsible for the FOG they create. And each grease trap overflow has the potential to send chemicals and other pollutants inside the traps into nearby rivers, lakes or other bodies of water. In fact, beach closures due to sewage overflows are commonplace in Los Angeles, which was sued in 2001 over a rash of 800 sewage overflows due to pipes clogged with FOG. In much the same way that fat and grease clog human arteries over time, they also clog sewage arteries.
| How to Find and Fight FOG |
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What is it? The fats, oils and greases that collect in grease traps at restaurants and food service or industrial kitchens. Related News & Blogs What's the problem? Unlike yellow fryer grease, FOG is tough to refine into biofuel due to high water content and impurities. So? When left on its own, FOG can cause dangerous and costly sewage overflows. What's to be done? Food service and facility managers can employ microbes to eat away at the FOG that collects. Bioremediation may also be an eco-friendly solution to FOG. And a few startups are working to develop biofuel feedstock from FOG. |
GreenBiz.com
"We have grease traps overflowing all the time," says Paul Strand, public works inspector for the city of Monterey Park, Calif., where the downtown corridor is home to many restaurants. "And when it happens, you need haz-mat crew to come out, and the Fire Department needs to barricade the area."
The acidity of the FOG eats away at pipes over time, which leads to major failures in sewage infrastructure. This is a constant concern to municipal water districts, most of which charge restaurants thousands of dollars in cleanup costs each time grease traps overflow, in addition to fining restaurants to encourage them to regularly check and clean the traps.
Aside from the environmental hazards of a spill, having grease traps pumped is expensive and getting costlier for eateries or building managers, as collectors pass on the rising fees they pay to get rid of the FOG. And collectors often have to drive far outside urban centers to reach a wastewater treatment plant or landfill that will accept the stuff.
This is where Grease Reduction Systems (GRS) sees its market opportunity. The company introduces microscopic organisms to a grease trap and uses an air pump and specialized telemetry equipment mounted inside the tank to balance the amount and type of microbes injected into the tank. The microbes consume the FOG, in order to eliminate or at least slow the FOG accumulation inside the tank. The process is called in-situ bioremediation, says Markus Lenger, founder and chief scientific officer of GRS. He says while bioremediation is a common tool for degrading effluent at wastewater treatment plants (which is where collectors often bring the FOG pulled out of traps), it had not been successfully deployed directly within grease traps.
