Grease drive: S.F. turns cooking oil into fuel

The cooks of San Francisco, where sauteing is a sacred rite for some, now have a place to send their used cooking oil without turning the city’s sewer system into a choked maze of congealed grease.

On Saturday, the city kicked off a four-day cooking oil recycling drive, during which residents can drop off their discarded olive oil, canola oil and other kitchen grease for eventual use in the city’s fleet of biofuel vehicles. At the last grease recycling drive, over Thanksgiving weekend, San Franciscans unloaded more than 2 tons of cooking oil.

“It’d be a shame to send this stuff to landfill. We knew there’s a better way,” said Ray Lucas of San Francisco, who was dropping off several plastic bottles of cooking oil at the grease recycle bin at the Whole Foods market on Potrero Hill on Saturday morning. “We were actually keeping two bottles of (used) oil from last Christmas, hoping we’d find a place to recycle it.”

Lucas and his wife, Lorraine, had made deep-fried Italian fritters called zeppole over Christmas, and the used oil had to go somewhere. If they had poured it down the kitchen drain, the oil would have coagulated and clogged the wastewater pipes. Kitchen grease is a major problem for the city’s pipes, accounting for 50 percent of all sewer emergencies a year, said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

San Francisco Chronicle