Posted on 05/06/2014 4:01:56 PM PDT by smokingfrog
Ft. Worth, TX - In darkened alleyways, a slimy cat-and-mouse game is playing out across America.
Men in trucks are fighting over a dirty and sometimes foul-smelling substance that restaurants once paid to get hauled off. Now it can be worth thousands per truckload. Liquid gold, some in the trade call it.
It's grease - used kitchen cooking oil from deep fryers at KFC and the seasoned saucepans of the fanciest French restaurant.
The increasingly consolidated industry, ranging from mom and pop operations to publicly traded giants, is marked by cutthroat competition to claim restaurant accounts. And all of them have to grab their grease before a ragtag swarm of thieves gets there first.
"This one is pretty clean," Clay Carrillo-Miranda of Haltom City's Best Grease Service said on his second-to-last stop of the day when he pumped out thick gunk from a container behind the J&J Oyster Bar in Fort Worth. "Some stink so bad you want to throw up. When it's 105 degrees, this job isn't a lot of fun, so that's when I go out at night."
And after sundown is when the thieves usually strike - and fast.
"You can pull in and drive off in five minutes. It can be $500 a night, $2,500 a week," said Carrillo-Miranda, 37, a beefy man in a black T-shirt and jean shorts. "Even if your truck gets impounded, that's $500. You're still ahead $2,000 for the week."
A 15-year veteran of the oil-recycling business, he spends several nights a month on stakeouts behind restaurants that contract with his employer. He has lost count of the locks he's replaced because of thieves with bolt cutters. His boss, Brian Smith, says a Burleson, Texas, man was caught using the firefighters' Jaws of Life to break into tanks.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
Grease is the word....
I have no idea why people go to all the trouble to make biodiesel when you can run a vehicle on used vegetable oil. there’s a local that’s been running a Cummins on SVO for years. All he does is filter it.
What’s swarf going for?
Someone writes a version of this story every two or three years.
If not, he certainly won't get any grief from me. Where we live highway taxes are pissed away on social projects.
The dead give away for the DOT guys is the exhaust of these users smell like French fries or whatever the oil has been used to cook.
Also this fuel gets real thick when it gets cold, say below 32 degrees and requires heaters to keep it from solidifying.
A friend of mine made and sold these filtration systems. Started a few years ago when fuel costs were very high. He ended up selling more overseas than here in the US because it is a tedious and messy way to go. It takes time to go round up used grease every day or so and fast food places now have caught on to the scam.
Me, I would rather spend my time being more productive generating more income in order to buy fuel than waste time with this time consuming messy, messy system.
By the way, the last I heard the states were working on laws requiring all manufacturers of these systems to report citizens that buy the things. If you did not report your mileage and pay your road taxes you got a visit from the tax man.
The scrap dealer takes fingerprints and mails the check. He does take the material but usually doesn’t end up paying.
Arrests are rare but have happened. It is mostly the tweakers who are arrested. One group of idiots stole a bronze statue from downtown and tried to sell it as scrap. They were all arrested.
Security would be a wash. The cost would not be worth the little bit that dissapears frm time to time.
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