Have you ever smelled a grease trap? To catch these guys just follow the smell.

Optical Aleutian: Yet another terrible act of crime inspired by television.

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Done in 2

Well played

/Last person in thread please turn out the lights

Now I Is!: If you have a biodiesel vehicle and your paying for what your put in it your doing wrong!

This, the guys I know who do this simply ask the restaurant manager if they can have it, and the answer is usually yes.

Oh, noes! Willy's retirement fund!

Gee, at $1,000 a pop, Willy might be able to afford to retire in style. I assume that the grease traps are cleaned at least a couple of times a year (if the used grease is also Willy's perquisite, then he's probably richer than Principal Skinner, but that pretty much goes without saying if he's union).

In Japan the top restaurants use their cooking oil only once and then sell it to a lower class of restaurant. These use it and then sell it down the food chain, so to speak, until it gets to the lowest class of restaurant or street vendor, whose clients like their food with an illustrious history and grease that fights back. I expect that a certain amount of creative recycling is done by North American restaurants--certainly, when you eat what the British called "made dishes" in the Nineteenth Century, you are eating leftovers tarted up with a new sauce.

I used to find sometimes find chili beans underneath the pepperoni of the university cafeteria pizza (chili one day, pizza the next). Personally, I usually make enough sauce for pasta that I can make a pizza or chili from the same sauce, but I don't usually do it the other way around and use leftover chili sauce for pizza. Still, like pasta, it's pretty much the same thing in a myriad of forms.

Some diesel engines can burn the oil outright with no other processing other than filtering. For others you need to process it in batches that convert it into actual diesel. Lots of garage kits on the market to do that sort of thing. Similar to home-brewing really. if the used cooking oil is worth $1000, the diesel it can produce is probably worth more like $5,000

If I had a diesel, I might be doing this instead of buying at the station.

You know I thought something like this might happen just as soon as some big companies got interested in bio-diesel.

When used oil was wanted just by these little guys with their home conversion sets, the restaurants gave it away, since they were paying trucks to come and dispose of it. Then companies were PAYING THEM to pick it up and the 'free fuel' movement kind of got squashed.

I figured there'd be problems when, a couple of years ago, I read of a couple of recycling trucking companies squabbling over who had he right to pick up barrels of reeking, stinking used oil at some fast food places.

Back then, home refiners were making bio-diesel for about $2.50 a gallon -- when the real deal was nearly $5.00 at the pumps. Plus they had found a market for the main leftover chemical from the process. Glycerin. Several companies were willing to buy that stuff up, including those involved in cosmetics.

So, it was almost a win-win situation for the back yard distillers.

It didn't take all that long before big companies moved in and pretty well dried up most of the available free used cooking oil.

The last time I checked, bio-diesel was selling for maybe a dollar a gallon less than the real stuff from crude oil.

That always cracks me up. Diesel, the CHEAPEST fuel to come from refining oil, jumped to nearly the most expensive nearly overnight as soon as it dawned on someone that the majority of our internal delivery systems run on the stuff. I wouldn't say there was that much of a shortage of diesel either.

The end result was thousands of independent truckers getting forced out of jobs, and they had helped keep the cost of transporting goods down by providing competition for the major trucking companies. Once that happened, the cost of shipping goods to stores just soared.

And you get to pay for it.

I figure these thefts were probably done by someone selling to home refineries or operating one themselves.

Pay attention for similar problems to show up in the used car oil business. As far back as the 60's, places used to buy used car oil, filter it and sell it to folks at a huge discount, but then oil makers started adding chemicals that couldn't be filtered out. Plus, car engines became more sophisticated and didn't burn through oil as fast.

Here in the South, during the hot summers, dirt roads were common and they kicked up a lot of dust, so cities bough used oil by the truck load and sprinkled it on the dirt, to 'lay the dust'.

They didn't know that the oil, washed off by rain, actually would never go away.

With the squabble over crude these days, someone will be looking hard at the millions of gallons of used car oil and finding a way to separate out the added chemicals. Often the combination of chemicals in two or three brands of oil, designed to protect an engine, would, when mixed, actually eat away at it.

So, I figure soon well have another participant in the 'Oil Wars' to squabble over what we used to throw out.

Naturally, in the long run, we'll be the ones getting screwed by the hiked up prices for the finished product.

I mean, I've watched the local recycling plant go from a small, noisy, company to a BIG major business within just a few years and now there's a squabble over a company wanting to build a noisy, dusty, cement recycling plant. They'll haul off concrete chunks from demolitions and reprocess them back into cheaper additives for local cement plants. Plus, they'll make money recycling all of the rebar and scrap metal found in the mess.

It's just that you don't want to live within a couple of miles of the factory. Not to mention that all of the dust it will make will eventually wind up washing down into the many drainage ditches we have in the area and they lead into the huge, brackish body of water called the 'Indian River Lagoon' which sits between the barrier island and the Atlantic Ocean.

THAT will lead to a host of further problems, which will then cost us even more money.

BubbaWilkins: Some diesel engines can burn the oil outright with no other processing other than filtering. For others you need to process it in batches that convert it into actual diesel. Lots of garage kits on the market to do that sort of thing. Similar to home-brewing really. if the used cooking oil is worth $1000, the diesel it can produce is probably worth more like $5,000

Yeah, I seem to recall a Mythbusters episode a few years back, where they ran an unmodified diesel with straight cooking oil, and with only a minor drop in fuel efficiency.

The only engines I know of that can run on just about anything are old Military Deuce's with the multifuel engine. Even then, they suggest you cut waste oil with a 50/50 mix of refined diesel. BUT, modern diesel engines are a completely different animal from the basic mechanical design. Go ahead and poor waste cooking oil or even waste motor oil into a empty F350, Dodge/Cummins, or Chevy truck and see how far it gets you.