Leandro: direct-plumbed oil disposal reduces waste, spills

Nation's Restaurant News, August 20, 2007 by James Scarpa

A direct-plumbed cooking-oil disposal system that links fryers in the kitchens of a Harvard University dining hall to storage tanks on its loading dock eliminates the laborious, messy and potentially hazardous work of manually dumping spent cooking oil, said Bob Leandro, director of facilities and physical plant for Harvard University Dining Services in Cambridge, Mass.

"In the old days, you poured used oil into 55-gallon drums or a Dumpster and called it a day, Leandro said.

However, the trend today is moving away from outdoor storage modes prone to be messy, smelly and unsanitary. In fact, some localities mandate a secondary containment structure for an outdoor oil-storage tank to prevent spills and leaks that could attract rodents. Moreover, it's difficult to keep oil stored outdoors free of rainwater and contaminants, as the rendering companies that collect it request.

To avoid such problems, and especially to nix the labor and hazards of dumping used oil into barrels by hand, Harvard chose a direct-plumbed oil removal system by Frontline International. Spent cooking oil from four fryers in the kitchen travels through a three-quarter-inch diameter pipe to two 1,500-pound containment tanks. The tanks are housed in a room adjoining the loading dock, easily accessible to the rendering company that suctions the oil out. Pumps inside the fryers' built-in filtering units propel the oil through the pipe. The storage tanks, which resemble "big stainless-steel water heaters," Leandro says, are neat and odor-free. An oil tank in another facility on campus sits in the office of a dining-services manager.

"The cooks love this system," Leandro said. "They don't have to carry around hot oil anymore, and when they change it, it takes seconds. It used to be a long process."

In other Harvard kitchens that haven't been plumbed, workers still unload spent fryer oil the old way--by draining it into a portable caddy and wheeling it out to the storage tanks. While not nearly as fast or easy as the direct-plumbed system, "it's still better than carrying it out in a pot," Leandro said, citing one of the ways operators have dealt with waste oil over the years.

"All the spills of waste oil that I've ever had have resulted from dumping it into barrels," Leandro said.

Going forward, used cooking oil may play a role in sustainable vehicle fueling on campus. In keeping with the Harvard Green Campus Initiative, a dining-services delivery truck has been converted to run on waste-oil diesel fuel. In addition, Leandro has met with officials of nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has a facility that converts waste cooking oil into biofuel, to discuss cooperating on a wider fueling project.