Editor’s note: This is the November installment of a monthly column written by the city of DeKalb’s Citizens Environmental Commission that focuses on increased awareness of issues such as promoting projects and ordinance changes involved in recycling, reducing energy consumption, and planting native habitat.
Anyone who cooks or prepares food at home will probably be familiar with a cooking byproduct that often cannot be avoided – used cooking oil or grease.
Whether you are frying bacon or baking a roast, oils and fats likely are going to be generated by your culinary efforts.
Oils and fats can be generated by many different types of cooking and are often crucial to many methods of cooking, such as with shallow or deep frying. They can also help to avoid burning your food and help to make the food taste better. Especially with Thanksgiving right around the corner, all that cooking oil and turkey grease will need to be cleaned up.
Although easy to dismiss, used cooking oil and grease must be disposed of properly or they can cause harm to your home, your community, and the environment.
The first and most important rule of oil and grease disposal is: Never pour used cooking oil down the drain. Even though most oils will be liquids shortly after cooking, they will often harden into solids as they cool. These masses of solid grease will harden and block drain pipes, causing drainage backups. Even oils that are liquid at room temperature can cause issues for proper drainage.
In worse scenarios, large deposits of hardened oil and grease can create blockages in public sewer lines. These blockages will eventually create pressure that can make sewage and wastewater back up into your basement drains, causing damage to your home. Grease that does make it through the pipes and sewers ultimately ends up in our creeks and rivers, posing a hazard to waterways and wildlife.
The proper way to dispose of used cooking oil and grease, thus protecting your home and the environment, is to pour it into a container to allow it cool. The container can be anything sturdy that may be lying around the house, such as old cans or glass jars (just be sure that the jar is not cold or it can crack from the heat).
Old pickle jars are a common option for grease storage, as they have lids that can help make storage easier. The grease can either be disposed of properly once cooled by throwing the entire container in the trash, or in some cases it can be reused for later cooking. Bacon fat is one example of grease that can be reused for later cooking, and it tastes great when used to fry eggs.
An even better and more environmentally friendly option for disposing of used cooking oil and grease is to bring it to the Kishwaukee Water Reclamation District.
KWRD safely will dispose of your used cooking oil for free and will utilize the oil in their efforts to generate renewable energy. Simply bring your container (the container must have a lid) to the KWRD Administration building at 1301 Sycamore Road in DeKalb and leave it in the labeled drop-box next to the front door any time of day, all year long.
So bring your turkey grease over to the KWRD facility to have an environmentally-friendly holiday!
• Nick Newman is a member of the city of DeKalb’s Citizens’ Environmental Commission.