Grease down the drain?

I always pour the grease down the drain right before I’m about to do dishes… that way all the soap and hot water keeps it moving.

When you pour grease down your drain, it ends up at the local water treatment plant, where equipment that cost you (citizen taxpayer) millions of dollars is used to remove it from the water. The resulting sludge usually goes into a sludge landfill.
Just an FYI.

@steelmarket How does that equipment work? Does it add detergent to the wastewater to combine with the grease? How does it separate the grease out?

I always run super hot water behind it and that’s usually right before I do dishes as well. ORRRR…. You could go dump it in the grass outside…

Pour it into a large empty tin can and freeze. Then when solidified, I take mine to the local transfer station.

Grease down the drain?? NEVER!!! You’re all asking for trouble, hot water or not.

I never put grease down the drain. I have an older house and don’t want to even chance that something would happen to the pipes.

I don’t ever pour my grease down the drain, but more importantly check out the cool Amazon recommendations on this thread! >>>

Steelmarket is right, the “right” thing to do is to treat grease as if it were engine oil. I know impractical, but it would be the right thing.

A) Grease has big potential to clog sewer pipes, many cities state on their websites that frying grease is a real problem costing plenty of taxpayer money.

B) As steelmarket says waste water plants need hellishly expensive “grease skimmers”, the sludge they produce, (think of it as greased shit, or the other way around) is not very biodegradable anymore and ends up in landfills.

C) Many fail to see that despite the fact that we “eat” frying grease, it has the same potential to contaminate drinking water as engine oil (albeit not being toxic of course).

I’m guilty too though, against better knowledge :/

http://sfwater.org/Files/FactSheets/Commercial_FOG_Trifold_for_webview.pdf

I always thought hot water also, but I heard that cold water is better to use with the grease down the drain, congeals it into lumpy sludge so it won’t stick to the walls of your pipes. Hot water makes the grease liquid but as the water and grease travel through the pipes it cools. It’ll coat the walls very nicely. Makes sense to me but I don’t put it down the drain anyway, private septic.

@pekenoe You gotta be kidding!! Cold water??? That would solidify it immediately. Whoever told you that must be a schister plumber who wants to make a lot of money.

I have always put it down the drain, with plenty of hot water.

@Grisson, what I’ve seen is that they have large separation pools with skimmers. These pools are usual round, with a centrally-hung skimmer arm and baffles all around the perimeter. The sludge is force outward into the baffles, which act similar to pool strainers. The skimmed sludge is then pumped into drying pits. The dried sludge is then trucked to a land fill.

As of about ten years ago, the EPA mandated that all these pools and pits be covered, to contain not just the smell but also to capture the VOCs. A lot of municipal installations are (sort of) grandfathered, and the process was phased in slowly so that the cities (i.e. many of us) could absorb the financial hit.

Wouldn’t grease that has been combined with detergent be suspended in the water and not float? (I mean, that’s what detergent does, right?)

But for the sake of argument, lets assume that down the drain is bad no matter what… The alternative is tossing the grease. Is there a better solution than pouring the grease into a small plastic (say a yogurt) container, which could have been recycled. That’s my usual method for tossing grease. Is there a better solution? I’ve often thought about pouring it on newspaper to absorb it and tossing the paper… although that gets messy, newspaper is probably better than the yogurt container on the environment.

I suppose I could save it up and combine it with lye and make soap that smells like gyros. (Maybe market as ‘exotic’ or something)....

May I modify my question to ask, what is the BEST way to dispose of grease?

Well, boxing it up – however – and putting it in the trash gets it trip straight to the landfill, avoiding the trip through the millions-dollar water treatment plant. There are companies that collect and recycle grease, but from restaurants, and they are not interested in the relatively small amounts generated by us bacon and gyros fans.

Landfills are, unfortunately, the way that most of the trash in the world is handled.

grease down the drain is a definite no no – All grease should be disposed of properly.

If you have a septic system, you are asking for the system to back up and stop working. Those poor little enzymes can’t digest grease.

Allow the oil to cool completely before disposing of it.

Decide whether the oil needs to be discarded. Oil used for deep-frying can usually be reused several times. Strain it into a clean sealable container.

To throw it away, carefully pour it into a strong sealable container, such as an old plastic jar with a lid. save jars for this purpose. Plastic jars are better than breakable glass ones.

Used cooking oil can also be composted with other organic matter. If you have a compost heap or a healthy backyard earthworm population, feed them kitchen scraps.

@bristolbaby you want me to feed the earthworms? No way!

@bristolbaby I’m just thinking of all that plastic in the landfill… Hmmm… (Think volume of fried chicken grease in the south…)