Cooking oil recycler cleans up at IMS, Gainbridge

It’s been a busy month for Jonathan Hunt, food service provider for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He started the month putting in 16- and 18-hour days, and his schedule has only grown more intense with the Indianapolis 500 days away.

“It’s been pretty hectic,” Hunt said. “We keep picking up more and more and more.”

But things could be worse. At least he doesn’t have to worry about disposing of the oceans of used cooking oil generated by the track’s many dozens of concession-stand fryers.

That little detail is handled by Centerville, Ohio-based entrepreneur Ken Melick, who owns a cluster of Filta Environmental Kitchen Solutions franchises in Indiana and Ohio. Founded in 1996, Filta describes itself as “a pioneer in active fryer management and environmental kitchen sustainability.” To put it simply, Melick’s employees use the company’s technology to filter used cooking oil for reuse. They also clean customers’ fryers and cart off used cooking oil to be recycled into, of all things, biodiesel fuel.

“The goal is, when the customer uses us, the only thing they have to do is show up and cook in the fryers,” Melick said.

The company possesses a fleet of vans, each containing a mobile filtration unit that extends the life of a particular batch of oil by sifting out traces of food items, such as pieces of breading, that can cause an “off” or burnt flavor. The fryer itself is also cleaned, then the filtered oil is put back in place.

“Each fryer takes about 10 or 15 minutes to clean,” Melick said. “And if the oil is at the end of its useful life, we’ll change it out for the customer, then take the used oil with us.”

He’s not alone in selling this convenience. However, the range of services offered by the hundreds of companies occupying this niche can be quite varied. Some, like Filta, offer one-stop service—filtering, oil replacement and removal of old oil. Other companies only cart off the used stuff to a recycler.

“It’s hard to estimate the total number of used cooking oil recovery companies, but it is easily in the hundreds,” said Kent Swisher, president and CEO of the North American Renderers Association.

According to Swisher, the U.S. cooking oil recycling market generates $2 billion in annual revenue, depending on the market value of used cooking oil, which, like any other commodity, can rise and fall dramatically. Prices generally range from 20 cents to 40 cents a gallon. Right now, used cooking oil—referred to as UCO—is on an uptick.

“The increase in the value of UCO is due to demand from the biomass-based diesel market, which has made it more important,” said Swisher, an Indiana native and Purdue University graduate.

Messy, smelly, dangerous

While used oil can (and is) refined on a large scale into biodiesel, that’s not the only reason it’s a good idea to keep it out of landfills and sewers. Everyone from plumbers to home economics teachers has for decades advised homeowners not to dump leftover cooking oil (especially varieties that congeal at room temperature) down their drains, because it can cause severe pipe blockages.

“If UCO isn’t recycled, it needs to be disposed of properly,” Swisher said.

As an example of this, he cited the near-legendary “fatberg”—a 130-ton mass of fat that clogged London sewers in 2017. It was the length of nearly three football fields.

“Although that was an extreme case, occasionally you will read articles about similar incidents in smaller towns and cities in the U.S.,” Swisher said. Indeed, pretty much any city utility of any size in the state of Indiana, from Nappanee to Bloomington, includes lengthy online pleas on their websites for customers not to dump fat down their drains.

The environmental friendliness of oil recycling is of interest to the various venues that use such services (including everyone from the IMS to Gainbridge Fieldhouse), but along with that comes an almost visceral joy of being able to offload the cleaning of fryers—notoriously one of the worst jobs in the entire food industry.

Having the stuff hauled away on trucks also gets rid of the necessity of having to collect it somewhere—typically in a reeking dumpster that can serve as a vermin magnet.

“In my younger days, I worked at a steakhouse, and we had a huge dumpster that was filled with actual animal fat, not just corn- or other plant-based frying oil,” Hunt said. “Raccoons would just jump right in. Every couple of weeks, you’d find one floating dead in the grease dumpster.”

That’s awful, but not nearly as disturbing as the thought of food service workers at major events having to clean the fryers themselves, then carry unwieldly containers of smelly oil to some central collection point, perhaps reachable only by negotiating crowds of event attendees.

“Changing the fryer oil is definitely one of the more risky jobs that we have to do,” Hunt said. “If we go by the corporate standards, you have to have a thick apron, a face guard, shin guards, arm guards and heavy gloves. You have to basically be completely covered in heavy rubber. The investment in safety equipment alone is close to $300.”

Such factors persuaded Holiday World & Splashin’ Safari in Santa Claus to get an outside company (again, Filta) to handle its oil. Before, the theme park filtered its own oil. It was a not-great solution, considering that many of the folks charged with draining, cleaning and refilling the park’s roughly 40 fryers of various makes and brands were just kids.

“Now, I don’t have to worry about teenagers trying to filter different types of fryers and moving oil around the park and possibly having spills,” said Lexi Hartman, assistant vice president of revenue operations at Holiday World & Splashin’ Safari. “We have far less burns now because we have professionals handling that instead of our team. It’s just more beneficial all the way around.”

More fryers, greater need

Hartman said the service works best for larger operations with lots of fryers and fryer models.

“If you have a single location with two or three fryers, then you’re going to have the same types of fryers, and you’re going to understand how to filter them,” she said. “But in such cases, for sustainability purposes, it would still be great to partner with a removal company so old oil could be used for biodiesel and other opportunities.”

Melick agreed that the bigger the venue, the better the business model seems to work. For instance, he said, at many locales the company services, such as casinos and large sports venues, management formerly had at least one employee who did nothing but clean fryers. That onerous duty is now handled by Melick’s employees.

“The nice part is that when you walk into a kitchen, the employees love to see us,” he said. “After a long shift, cleaning fryers is the last job they want to do.”

One measure of how popular used oil recycling has become is the growing level of theft associated with the field. NARA estimates that as much as $75 million in used oil is stolen out of restaurant and entertainment venue dumpsters by crime rings each year. Trenton, New Jersey-based used oil recycler D&W Alternative Energy has even started an online “grease theft tracker” service that pinpoints such crimes in the New Jersey area.

So far, however, there are few reports of similar thefts in Indiana (though a handful have been reported in Ohio). Melick’s company sells about six truckloads (about 36,000 gallons) of used oil to refiners every month, which it stores at a central site until it can be purchased. And yes, that central site generates a rather loathsomely malodorous bouquet.

“It’s got its own unique smell,” Melick said. “But you get used to it.”•