Ask Dethroner: Used Cooking Oil Disposal
10 Comments Published by Randy October 23rd, 2006 in Ask Dethroner, Food. Share ThisIn the interest of better dinner fare—pan-fried chicken specifically—and environmental responsibility, I’ve happened upon quite the problem: What do I do with all this used vegetable oil?
This is an important question. Animal fats like lard taste darn good. (Heck, even vegetable oil is pretty tasty.) You can perform numerous gastronomic miracles with it; it’s also an excellent addition to your Tuesday night Greek wrestling tournament. We use tons of it—in 1997 total world fat consumption was over 184 million tons; Just imagine how much more we’re using now that we’re deep-frying Iraqi insurgents.
Fifty years ago you might have put used oil in the slop bucket with the other kitchen scraps and fed it to the hogs or the chickens. These days, in an urban setting, you don’t have the same methods of disposal available. I suggest the following course of action:
- Reuse your cooking oil. Oil used for deep frying can be re-used several times. After the oil has cooled strain it through a coffee filter or cheesecloth into a clean glass container with a lid. Over time the smoke point of the oil will lower. When your filtered oil begins to smoke before you can get your food into the pan it’s time to toss it.
- Talk to the owners of local restaurants. A few are beginning to sell their used oil to biodiesel producers. They may be happy to allow you to discard of your used oil in their containers. (On the other hand, they may identify you as a hippy terrorist and call the FBI on you.)
- If you have the space and a large compost system you can compost the used oil in small amounts. “If you can trace your compostables back to a living source then it can be composted”.
- Locate you local Household Hazardous Waste Drop-Off Center. They’ll probably take your used oil to the landfill anyway but some cities are sending it to biodiesel producers.
- Never ever pour your used cooking oil down the drain. This will leave a high quality, sticky grease like substance in your drain pipes and you will spend many hours cleaning it out.
Or you could dump the vat of oil out in the woods… but watch out for the trees.
(but really, don’t do this, it’s just a reference to a TV show – be respectful to your earth mother)
More seriously, if you’re only shallow frying stuff, you could use cooking spray instead. Much less oil used, so disposal is no longer an issue. It’s also probably healthier.
If you just want to throw away the oil without trying to pour it down your drain or something (which is a good way to screw up your plumbing) then you can simply line a container with a wad of paper towels and pour the unwanted grease/oil into the container. The paper towels will soak up the grease/oil and make it much easier to dispose of the stuff.
“Never ever pour your used cooking oil down the drain. This will leave a high quality, sticky grease like substance in your drain pipes and you will spend many hours cleaning it out.”
where’s your sense of adventure?! this would be a GREAT example to use in your plumbing week!
The merits of good used cooking oil are under appreciated. I usually pour some on the dog’s food and some on the cat’s food for several days. It may not be any better for their arteries than mine, but it does wonders for the animals’ coats and they will thank you for it.
Find someone who brews their own biodiesel or runs a veg-oil car an offer to hand it off to them. :)
Remembering from my college days four years ago, a friend and I collected the used cooking oil from a Chinese restaurant. We modified his old VW Jetta and used the oil as biodiesel fuel. It was good for some time until we found a farmer using this oil in his tractor. He was paid a nickel to take all the oil.
you really shouldn’t try to compost oil, it’s a animal by-product, which in animal speak means, “hmm, that smells like cooked meats, let’s go ransack that compost pile”. It’s a pain in the ass, and will never really break down, since it’s broken down already, your compost will always have an oil slick. Then when you’re spreading it around as compost, then you’ll have to deal with the insect infestation and animals just destroying your plants. Uh, not that I’ve done that or anything :p
I pour it into Poland Spring 5 gallon carboys and then bring it to the dump on waste days.
But if you’re fancy pants and cook duck, SAVE that shit. It’s liquid gold. Strain it through a chinois or a strainer with coffee filters or paper towels to get the bulky shit out of it, then put it in a container and keep it in the fridge. Duck fat is some of the most heavenly stuff on earth. You technically could do this with all your oils to reuse. As long as you don’t scortch the oil, you can reuse it a few times. I tend to get an average of 2 uses per batch o’ oil.
The best thing to do with it is run your car on it… Now I know that most of the readers of Dethroner are from the US where Diesel cars are a bit thin on the ground but over here in Europe they are everywhere… Running your car on Veg Oil is becoming normal in the UK because of the tax on fuel. Just think a liter of diesel is £0.90 but a liter of Veg Oil is £0.40 it’s a no brainer really… The only down side is your car smells like a chip shop :)
I’ve also read in cooking group newsthreads that you can mix it with bird seed and the birds like it. I haven’t tried that, though.
This is a serious question about the long-term effects of cooking oil in the pipes. My senior friend in Oakland, CA lives in a building (THE ALTENHEIM) filled with elderly Chinese, whose oily food smells are very potent. Five weeks ago, a dreadful, acrid, unidentifiable odor started coming through the living/dining room of this very small apartment, intermittently, quite bad, but not sickening as with most rotting material. He has had the fire dept. come, the toxic waste people, the building manager and building handyman, etc. etc. all involved in the hunt for the source of this smell. One day, as he was complaining yet again, I insisted we run downstairs to see exactly what WAS beneath his second-story window. There was a closed pipe coming up, with the odor right near the ground around it, and it leads into the crawlspace beneath the building.
It suddenly dawned on me that these immigrant peasant Chinese, most of whom speak no English (their immigrant children dump them on the CHC budget), could be dumping so much oil down the pipes that it has coagulated with other materials, creating this strange and cloying odor.
Could I be right? What would be the solution if it is true? Or would you have another idea what could be causing it? No one has been able to do anything!
Write to me at my email, frblarney@aol.com, if ANYONE has ever had such an experience in an apartment house.
Mark