After you’ve fried the rooster or sautéed the veggies, don’t pour the leftover cooking oil down the drain. Whereas it’d seem harmless, pouring used oil down the drain can wreak havoc in your personal residence’s plumbing and native sewage methods.
Whenever you’re not already gathering leftover cooking oil in a container beside the vary — just like Grandma —chances are your drain has some substantial buildup. Although it’s liquid, oil, like grease, clings to pipes in small particles that latch onto each other, gathering until you’ve got a clogged drain — or worse. In actuality, cooking oil and kitchen grease are a critical motive behind fatbergs that clog sewer pipes.
Plumbers will let you understand to pour leftover cooking oil and grease into an earlier can, jar, or plastic jug, and when it’s cooled, merely seal the container and toss it throughout the trash. Nonetheless there’s another choice to throwing it out.
Recycle Cooking Oil for Totally different Gasoline
That’s correct, your used cooking oil may very well be refined into one other gasoline, or biofuel, that burns clear in most diesel engines. Whereas many industrial facilities already contribute substantial supplies of oil for recycling, some packages invite households to recycle their further cooking oil as successfully.
Use Earth911 Recycling Search to find a recycling location near you that accepts cooking oil. Moreover, some biofuel or biodiesel companies might current further drop-off locations spherical food-related holidays, equal to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Hanukkah, so take profit.
Be certain you confirm with the recycler for his or her requirements for oil storage and preparation and adjust to their ideas. On the entire, don’t mix any water with the oil, try and filter out bits of meals floating throughout the fat, and retailer the oil in a tightly sealed container.
You assume filtering bits of meals out of earlier oil sound gross? It’s not as unhealthy as having to clean out your clogged drains later!
Editor’s Phrase: Initially printed on December 1, 2009, this textual content was updated in December 2024.