Dealing with used cooking oil is a hassle you certainly already have on your plate (figuratively!). But how you do it can have a huge impact on everything from the environment around your restaurant to your marketing strategy to your bottom line. Yes, the consequences of discarding oil improperly can be painful—but they don’t have to be. Here are four bad things that happen if you do, and the simple, environmentally-friendly solution that can make them go away.
Used cooking oil can be an environmental nusiance
As good as french fries and chicken parmigiana taste, the waste cooking oil left over after it did its duty can accumulate on surface water and rob plant and animal life of oxygen. Whether you’re sending used oil to the landfill, flushing it or sending it down the drain, that yellow grease will ultimately degrade and release methane, a potent greenhouse gas. And that’s in addition to congealing and potentially blocking pipes.
You won’t be popular with your neighbors
If you don’t stay on top of your grease collection system, it can leak or overflow. And rancid cooking oil is particularly foul-smelling.
You’re missing out on a marketing opportunity
Nobody wants the bad publicity of being labeled environmentally insensitive, but choosing to do something sustainable with your used cooking oil, like selling it to a recycler, can actually be part of a marketing strategy that increases your revenue. Generation Z consumers in their 20s
have more than $350 million in disposable income to spend, but they’re eating out 10 percent less than their older millennial counterparts—in part because supporting establishments that practice social responsibility is important to them. Practicing waste oil recycling along with other environmentally friendly strategies is simply good business.
Why get fined when you can get paid?
If a marketing strategy is too abstract and hard to compute ROI, what about simple math? A typical restaurant that recycles its oil with Lifecycle Renewables earns more than $TK a month sending TK gallons of oil to be repurposed into carbon-neutral heating oil. That’s real money that makes a real difference to your bottom line. And if you don’t want to do it for the right reasons, avoiding costly fines for discarding oil improperly is a good motivator, too: In Philadelphia, if you toss the oil and it damages pipes or hurts the environment, you’re on the hook for both repair costs and a big fine. In New York City, those fines can be as much as $10,000 per day!
Talk to a recycling specialist at Lifecycle Renewables today to find out how easy it is for your restaurant to benefit from clean, green, no-hassle waste oil disposal.
