Recycling waste grease in San Francisco
The City of San Francisco announced earlier this week that it will start a free grease recycling service called SF Greasecycle. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, commercial food preparation establishments (think restaurants and hotels) can donate used oil to the city, which will send out trucks to pick up the fuel and deliver it to local biodiesel producers that will turn it into biofuel. The Chronicle says that "San Francisco officials believe theirs will be the largest such effort" and that the hope is to expand the service to home and individual oil users in the future. The biodiesel will initially be used by MUNI buses, but eventually all city diesel vehicles will likely be run on this locally-recycled fuel.This is sensible and good news. The Biodiesel Blog, where I first caught wind of the announcement, calls it great. By taking the waste oil out of the garbage stream (lots gets illegally dumped into sewers) and into the fuel system, San Francisco is showing other cities how to solve multiple problems at once. Since the city has long had a plan to use more biodiesel in its fleet (see links below), shifting the biomass source from Midwest soybeans to local waste is just smart planning. Read the details in the Chronicle.
Related:
[Source: Biodiesel Blog]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dale 3:12PM (11/24/2007)
Pretty soon the "commercial food preparation establishments" will wise up and start SELLING their used oil instead of giving it away so they can recoup some of the cost of the oil they bought. Right now they are giving it away to avoid the expense of disposing of it. As demand for the use oil increases, it well become a commodity they can sell to create a new revenue stream.
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dwf 3:16PM (11/24/2007)
Make that "As demand for the used oil increases,..."
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Hank 3:49PM (11/24/2007)
Yep. All the shade-tree green mechanics running VWs and old MBs on veggie oil are running on free fuel for only a little while longer.
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GreyFlcn 9:32PM (11/24/2007)
While nice, we're only talking about a tiny fraction compared to our total liquid fuel energy demand.
Less than 1% (0.7%)
We can get 3% of our transportation fuels met merely by inflating our tires better.
Just to keep things in perspective, while certainly it's nice, if we assume the massive DAMAGE causes by pushing forward with biofuels that tiny ittybitty percent is asbolutely stupid to give much fanfaire too.
http://greyfalcon.net/tropics3
http://greyfalcon.net/palmoil
http://greyfalcon.net/ran
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bioburner 6:42PM (11/25/2007)
Here in northern virginia most restraunts have to PAY a rendering company to pick-up the used oil. The rendering company then recycles the used veggie oil back in to the chicken feed industry. Huuuuum greasy chicken.
Like the approach by the city of San Francisco, maybe this catch on.
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Wildgoosechase 11:08PM (11/25/2007)
Has anyone tried to separate grease and oils at the sewage treatment plants for bio-diesel? Considering that it is literally piped to the plant it should be cheap to implement, and I won’t feel so bad pouring my cooking oils down the drain.
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