‘You can make $10,000 in a night’: Thieves target used cooking grease

Washington Post via Houmatoday ^ | 4/19/19 | Justin Jouvenal

[Libloather]

The heist began with a thief backing a large, white box truck up behind a Virginia mall around 3:30 a.m. one day in early April, according to a search warrant. The man wasn’t looking for cash or electronics, but something stranger: used cooking grease.

He siphoned about 150 gallons of the stinking, viscous liquid from a dumpster behind a Burger King, before a police officer patrolling Annandale Shopping Center busted him, according to the search warrant, filed in Fairfax County.

The crime is not new, but law enforcement officials say thieves are targeting the stuff used to make french fries and fried chicken anew because of a run-up in biodiesel prices in the past couple of years. Cooking grease can be turned into the fuel, creating a surprisingly lucrative black market for a substance most people wouldn’t touch.

[punchamullah]

Seems that in an age when we have put men on the moon and built the internet some genius could find a way to lock the tank filler and the draw valve.

[Celerity]

“Thieves just recycling the old, used cooking grease Americans won’t recycle.”

That’s the point of the article. There is a company who IS recycling it into biofuel and other food-related things. And people pay for it. Someone is taking money from another.

[PIF]

Think nothing of it - I get up ar 3 AM and post before going to work and such a thing has happened to me many times ...

[PIF]

Great idea but like breaking and entering no matter how many locks you put on the door there is always someone with a Port A Power that will just come through the wall. Or in this case punch a hole in the tank and have at it.

[metmom]

I found that out later.

Had no idea it was a market.

[Mastador1]

First, this is nothing new, people were doing this in the seventies and early 80's until the price dropped so low restaurant owners had to pay the rendering companies to take it.

Second, if a thief comes onto your private property and takes what you own it's stealing. Used grease is not placed in a 'dumpster' it is either held in a in ground storage tank or in barrels locked in enclosures called a grease safe. Either way a 'thief' trespasses on private property and breaks into a locked receptacle to take what does not belong to them. That's how it is stealing.

I guess you would be OK with someone going onto your property at night and taking some of your property that they figured was trash.

[JohnnyP]

We live in a condo and each courtyard has a trash bin. There are people that go through the bins looking for things they can sell or recycle. I don’t have a problem with that.

The way the headline was written made it sound like it was “in the trash”, rather than in a storage container to be sold.

[crosdaddy]

Thank you for the explanation, the word “polymer “ just didn’t sound right to me, when we’re talking about fat.

[an amused spectator]

It’s also garbage that has made most of the older kerosene heaters in the US obsolete, and I’ve personally seen it disrupt a cold-weather lumber operation.