[USCC] Wall Street Journal article on grease dumping

[Jim McNelly]

Municipal Heart Attack: Illegal Dumping Of Fryer Grease,
Fat Leads to Infarctions
The Sewer-Fat Crisis Stirs a National Stink

By BARRY NEWMAN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL NEW YORK --



District Council 37, the municipal employees union, has been putting up 
posters in the subway lately, praising the "everyday heroes" who work for 
the City of New York.  The posters have pictures of a tree pruner, a museum 
guard, a dental hygienist.  Do the guys who get rid of fat clogs in the 
sewers rate a picture?

Nah.

"Never got on a poster," George Markovics shouts above the oceanic roar of 
his jet-flusher truck.  He is standing over a manhole in south Brooklyn, 
looking down.  At the bottom of the hole, where raw sewage should be 
babbling along, a smear of sickly gray goop is blocking the pipe.  "I like 
water, you know, sewers -- I love it," yells Mr.  Markovics, who works for 
the Department of Environmental Protection.  Positioning his rig near the 
hole, he bellows: "We do a lot for the city.  We're the best.  Hey, watch 
your back!"

Maybe Mr.  Markovics, who is 40 years old, can qualify as a poster boy for 
the national sewer-fat crisis.

America's sewers are in a bad way.  Three quarters are so bunged up that 
they work at half capacity, causing 40,000 illegal spews a year into open 
water.
Local governments already spend $25 billion a year to keep the sewers 
running.  The Water Infrastructure Network, a coalition of the 
wastewater-aware, warns that it will cost an additional $20 billion a year 
for the next 20 years to keep them from falling apart.

Roots, corrosion, cave-ins, bottles, broken stick-ball bats, rusty car 
parts -- anything will divert sewage on its way to the treatment 
plant.  But the blockages now are almost all wrapped up in fat.  The 
perpetrator is fried food.

Fueled by the fast-food frenzy and an influx of immigrant cooks, America's 
appetite for eating out has bloated the national output of a viscous goop 
known as restaurant grease -- to three billion pounds a year.  Where does 
used grease go?  Traditionally, into the cauldrons of the rendering 
industry, which processes animal castoffs into useful products.  But for 
reasons ranging from Malaysia's palm-oil boom to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's 
crackdown on New York's garbage Mafia, more goop than ever is ending up in 
the sewer.

How it wends its way in -- by pipe?  by bucket?  -- is a matter of culinary 
mystery and governmental mystification.  Once the goop arrives, the effect 
is clearer than mud: Grease and sewage don't mix.

Don Montelli stands over a manhole on another Brooklyn corner -- a 
"notorious grease spot," he says, in front of a Chinese take-out.  Mr.
Montelli, a high-tech sewer worker, holds a video screen attached by wire 
to a robot camera down below.  "What you're looking at right now," 
Mr.  Montelli explains, "is grease down the sewer."

With colonoscopic clarity, the camera shows a pipe with a drippy coating of 
fat.  Fat won't pollute; it won't corrode or explode.  It accretes.  Sewer 
rats love sewer fat; high protein builds their sex drive.  Solids stick in 
fat.  Slowly, pipes occlude.

Sewage backs up into basements -- or worse, the fat hardens, a chunk breaks 
off and rides down the pipe until it jams in the machinery of an 
underground floodgate.  That, to use a more digestible metaphor, causes a 
municipal heart attack.

Fat infarctions have struck of late in Honolulu, Columbus, Ohio, and Lake 
Placid, N.Y.  A grease clot in Cobb County, Ga., recently set off a 600,000 
gallon sewage surge into the Chattahoochee River.  In January, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency sued Los Angeles for allowing 2,000 
overflows in the past five years; an EPA audit blamed 41% of them on fat.

New York's sewers run for 6,437 miles.  Waste water and storm water mix in
70% of the system.  When it rains hard, treatment plants can't cope with 
the flow, so regulators open and the mess gushes into rivers and bays.  On 
dry days, the gates are supposed to stay closed, and do -- except when 
grease gums up the works.

With 21,000 places serving food, New York gets 5,000 fat-based backups a 
year and several big gum-ups.  Its environmental protectors have fingered 
greasy-spoon districts as suspects, not just Coney Island and Chinatown, 
but the area around Carnegie Hall.  New York's greasiest sewers, however, 
lie in the section of the borough of Queens called Flushing.

Flushing's Fat Fallacy Flushing is solidly Asian and 
restaurant-intense.  Bouquet of deep-fryer wafts over streets abloom with 
signage.  Crowds push past hole-in-the-wall stalls; fish and vegetable 
stands build mountains of perishing perishables.  So much fat gets flushed 
in Flushing that last year it blocked the sewers 50 times.  Three times at 
the end of 1999, it locked up floodgates and let raw sewage flush into 
Flushing River.

"We are subjected to the stench of sewer dirt to the degree that we are 
throwing up.  This is not to laugh!" So said Julia Harrison, to laughs, at 
a special City Hall sewer-fat hearing.  Ms.  Harrison is Flushing's City 
Council member.
"Restaurant people have been preached to, given literature, and still plead 
ignorance," she said.  "It's not ignorance.  It's up yours!"

"And down ours!" came a shout from the audience.

The city's plumbing code requires "grease-generating establishments" to 
have grease traps.  A grease trap is a box.  Greasy water flows into it and 
slows, letting the grease rise.  The water drains into the sewer and the 
grease stays.  The MGM Grand in Las Vegas has five 15,000 gallon grease 
traps; trucks pump them out.  In big cities, traps fit under kitchen 
floors.  They have to be emptied by hand.

Scooping out a grease trap is a job nobody wants to do after 
dinner.  Often, nobody does.  When a trap fills, greasy water races through 
it.  A Chinese kitchen with four wok stations needs a 5,000 gallon trap or 
it may as well have no trap at all.  Lots of places, Chinese and otherwise, 
don't.

Last year, New York kicked off a "Grease Outreach" campaign.  A kitchen 
dragnet uncovered a 73% rate of grease-trap abuse.  The city cracked down, 
first in Flushing, with fines of $1,000 a day.  "We think we've been 
effective,"
says Robert LaGrotta, head of pollution prevention.  Except that the sewers 
are still full of fat.

New York has six grease inspectors for 21,000 restaurants.  It asks them 
all to recycle trap grease, but the city has only one trap-grease 
recycler.  "We thought this was the future," says Livio Forte of A&L 
Recycling.  It wasn't.  Trap grease is too watery -- expensive to boil 
down.  In a month, A&L collects only
15,000 gallons of it.

Which recycles the question: Where does the grease go?  Forget trap grease 
-- it's a drop in the can.  Most restaurant grease actually comes from 
deep-fat fryers.  You can't pour gallons of that down the drain.  The real 
issue is:
What happens to the deep fat?  Mr.  LaGrotta admits he's out of his 
depth.  "From my understanding," he says, "it has value, but I'm no 
expert.  Better talk to some people in the business."

A place to start is Darling International Inc., a rendering company whose 
Web site says, "We are the grease team.  We love it.  We dream grease.  Its 
color.  Its ...  you know ...  greasiness."

"The value on this product is low," says Neil Katchen, who runs Darling's 
eastern region.  "The cost of processing is high.  Honestly, I've been in 
the business 30 years and prices have never been so bad."

Mr.  Katchen is talking yellow grease.  After Darling centrifuges 
french-fry particulates out of restaurant grease, yellow grease 
results.  Once, yellow grease was animal fat; now, it's vegetable oil.  It 
goes into animal feed, but has uses in paint, face powder and adhesive 
tape.  With oil costs rising, some renderers are burning it.

Yellow grease is an international commodity.  On the exchanges, it's up 
against Brazilian soy oil and Southeast Asian palm oil, not to mention 
cocoa butter, Borneo tallow, meadowfoam oil and beeswax.  Thanks to 
Third-World plantations, global oil-and-fat output has tripled since 1960, 
to more than
100 million tons a year.  With this great grease glut sending prices ever 
downward, high-cost old fryer fat can't compete.

Low-Grade Grease A grease pumper like Darling won't collect low-grade 
grease in New York.
Darling gets it from scavengers willing to wrestle five-gallon jugs and
50-gallon drums out of cellars and back alleys.

"My family came here from Europe and got into grease because grease was 
good business," says Bob Sirocco, who is 42 and one of the grandchildren.
His company is called American Byproducts.  At 8 p.m., he's been wrestling 
grease since dawn.  The price collapse has upset Mr.  Sirocco's traditions: 
The grandfather paid for old fat; the grandson charges to haul it away.

"We don't charge enough," he says.  "Maybe $30 a month." But his customers 
are in revolt.  They don't have to hire grease collectors, so why should they?
"They just, ah, do with the grease whatever they do with it," says Mr.
Sirocco.
"It's something I don't pursue."

This is where the Mafia comes in.

A grease disposal trick, restaurant people say, is to freeze it in plastic 
and chuck it into the garbage.  Problem one: In summer, it melts all over 
the sidewalk.

Problem two: In 1996, Mayor Giuliani broke the cartels that fixed prices on 
garbage pickups.  "One of the things they did," the mayor told the press at 
the time, "was to beat people up, bust their kneecaps and kill them." The 
city sent some perps to prison, asked national haulers to take over many 
routes and clapped a lid on prices.

That took care of the Mafia, not the grease.  For pickups, haulers charge 
restaurants by the cubic yard; for dumping, landfills charge haulers by the 
ton.
That means the profitable garbage is light and fluffy.  Grease is heavy and 
dense
-- and putrid and sloppy.  With prices capped and profits slim, haulers are 
raising a stink.  They won't take the grease.

"No, absolutely not," says Bill Johnson at Waste Services of New York, a 
company with restaurant routes all around Flushing.  "Grease is something 
we do not want to see in our trucks."

So?  Where does it go?

"This is really reprehensible," says John Lagomarsino.  "They dump it in 
the sewer at 1 o'clock in the morning." Mr.  Lagomarsino, of J&R Rendering, 
is Bob Sirocco's cousin and a fellow grease man.  "Look in the sewers," he 
recommends.  "You see grease trails going into them.  I mean, this is 
primeval."

Presented with this intelligence, a garbage collector in lower Manhattan 
drops a can and says, "Here, I'll show you." He walks to a corner sewer and 
points in.
"See.  That's grease." The basin is plugged solid.  Lots of Flushing's are, 
too.
One, on a restaurant-thick street, is so full even its grate is gunked up, 
and simple to sample: Sewer grease is gritty yet supple, sticky yet smooth, 
with hints of putty and beach tar.

"To me," George Markovics is yelling across the open manhole in south 
Brooklyn, "it's almost a concrete substance."

Mr.  Markovics has lowered his flusher hose into the hole.  Now he 
maneuvers its nozzle into the pipe, hits a lever and guns up the water 
pressure.  The nozzle rockets into the blockage.  Seconds later, sewage 
boils out, followed by hunks of fat riding the gusher toward the next 
floodgate.

"Know what this is from?" Mr.  Markovics says as the flow returns to its 
usual ooze.  "This is from good cooking.  Good cooking -- know what I mean?
Whenever I see grease, that's what I think of.  Good cooking and good food."