Don’t put it down your drain: cooking oil and grease
We all know we’re not supposed to pour used cooking oil, bacon fat, or other grease products down the drain, but we do it anyway. And The Scottish Plumber knows we do it anyway because we are often called to open kitchen drains when they get clogged, and remove globs and globs of solidified cooking grease. We recently replaced some kitchen pipes for a remodeling project and peered through a section of drainpipe after it was removed. A layer of solidified oils and fats had reduced the width of the pipe to only 3/4 of an inch. It was only a matter of time before a small piece of food lodged itself in the grease and caused a clog!
Even if you run lots of hot water and soap down the drain while pouring the oil, it’s still going to collect on the pipe walls and turn into a sludge that is hard to remove from your pipes- often requiring high-pressure water jetting. But if we’re not supposed to pour greasy and oily substances down our drains, then what do we do with them? During the Great Depression, families would often re-use their cooking oil several times before discarding it; and during WWII, families used to save their bacon fat in jars and donate them to the war effort- where factories would use the fat to create glycerin for explosives.
Today, you can still use your cooking oil more than once if it was lightly used and you strain it through a fine mesh strainer or cheesecloth. Some municipalities also have recycling centers or drop-off points for used cooking oil to be safely disposed or re-used. Keep a sealable container like a peanut butter jar or pickle jar (either glass or plastic if you’re afraid glass will break) near your sink, and after the oil has cooled enough (especially if you’re using a plastic bottle- you don’t want to melt the plastic), carefully pour the grease into the jar. When the jar is full you can throw it in the garbage if it’s small, or find a disposal location.
You can use the grease in a compost heap if you have one, or take it to your local landful or hazardous waste facility (the same place you would take paints, batteries, chemicals and CFL bulbs). Ask your local city government or municipality office for locations to dispose of used cooking oil or grease. Some restaurants will even take the oil to include it with their own disposed oil for recycling- restaurants that use large quantities of oil for frying are required to pay for a service that picks up their used oil and disposes of it safely- ask a restaurant if you can bring yours to include in their disposed oil.
