It’s all about the Vegetable Oil
“It’s all about the oil”, goes the old WVO saying. If there’s no vegetable oil, then there is nothing for our centrifuges to clean, nothing for our heat exchangers to heat and nothing good to smell coming out of our tailpipes. Our ingenious cleaning/filtering, heating and switching mechanisms will be rendered useless without the “liquid gold”, yellow grease or WVO. Yes, as important as it is to properly clean and heat your oil, it is also becoming equally important to find and secure your quality WVO source.
What used to be a liability for the restaurant industry, waste oil has been turned into an asset. The “garbage” oil that had been dumped from the fryers and cost money for disposal is now fetching anywhere up to $1.00 a gallon in some places. Why this change? On the macro-level, this can be attributed to the price of “yellow grease” in the commodity market. See http://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/lswagenergy.pdf for the latest prices. Basically, companies are paying up to $.41/lb for clean WVO. The cubies are 35lbs so that’s 14.35 a cubie or ~$3.18/gallon. One year ago, it was about $1.86/gallon. Needless to say, more and more are seeing dollar signs in the greasy barrels behind restaurants and it’s getting ever more difficult to find.
On a micro level, it is difficult to find WVO because of the large local renderers. They have been the first to seize and profit upon the “free collection” angle and have undoubtedly sent motivated salespeople to every nook and cranny to secure ALL available sources of WVO. It is apparent in many regions that the companies have no competition and have monopolized the collection of WVO. Approaching or working with these companies as individual or collective WVO’ers with great caution. Approaching these companies should be viewed as approaching the lions den. I’ve heard enough stories to be discouraged in forming any kind of partnership or relationship with large renderers. Some renderers are willing to use fear tactics and swindler payment schemes to steal accounts away from individuals and each other. Ah yes, it can all be justified under the guise of “business”, however, not the way I want to do business.
Alas, where does that leave us, the small guys. Are we left to duke it out with each other, left powerless against the large oligarchies? Hell no. We have the power of local, the power of community. It carries a lot of weight to be a patron of the restaurant you are collecting from. It is an advantage to not to need to be ever-expanding, needing to secure more and more sources to stay alive as the renders do. So we have the power of patience, the power of local and the ability to strategically go after a handful of sources to be secure. Check out our Library for an overview and tips on finding a WVO Source. And, only as a last resort you should offer money. This feeds into the mechanism that drives up prices and believe me you will have trouble forking over the money every month for oil you have to collect and clean.
Once you have a source, one of the proven ways to secure the source is with a simple contract. If you’re like me, you will cringe at anything official and lawyer-ry like a contract, but it can be as simple as our example here: Sample Contract It is also likely to give you the security you need when the renderers come a knocking at your source. Remember, we need to use any tools we can to compete against the large companies.
So approach the management at your favorite restaurants, scope out the bins at the places in your neighborhood and make a plan of attack to seize the oil. Have some cards produced for your name and clean prompt collections service. Walk around on a Saturday afternoon and pass them out after conversing with restaurant management.
Here are some other ideas:
Post weekly ads on Craigslist about your clean, prompt and reliable collection service.
Make a simple website about your collection service.
If you have a cleaning/filtering setup you can offer a service for cleaning their oil for an exchange of some dirty oil.
Buy un-filtered WVO from another greaser, like at .50 a gallon ideally. It saves a lot of time and headache of collecting. It’s not hard to find people who have collected more than they can use and have extra-unprocessed WVO taking up valuable space. “Honey, I can’t pull the car in the garage anymore, please get rid of this oil!” Craigslist is a good resource for this.
I highly recommend making friends with at least one other person running on WVO. Ask for a meeting, have some coffee, share stories and see if there’s any way you can help each other out. It is uplifting to share war stories, knowledge and share in the workload and rewards. Additionally, you will gain a greasy shoulder to cry on when the day comes when you just can’t go on greasing, you have a major oil spill, or it just feels like too much work.
That’s all I got. What about you? What methods and techniques have worked for you?
-Jason Jelonek