Used cooking oil containers at restaurants are often treated like trash bins, but a Milwaukee company has seen the value in the congealed fat.
Cream City Grecycling collects used cooking oil from Milwaukee-area restaurants and sells it back to the City of Milwaukee as biodiesel.
Cream City is a project of Fusion Renewables, a biodiesel marketing and distribution company based at the Port of Milwaukee, 1626 S. Harbor Drive. It has a tolling relationship with several oil companies – Fusion provides the grease and the oil companies convert it into biodiesel, then send it back to Fusion for distribution.
Jake Turetsky, manager of feedstock procurement at Fusion, started the Cream City program in July 2011 after being involved with a similar project, Grease Lightning, in New Jersey.
Through the Cream City program, Fusion and its partners collect grease from about 50 area restaurants using a pumper truck with a sucking tube mechanism.
“We take the oil where we can get it – some restaurants, some chains,” said Robert Stensberg, manager of quality control and feedstocks.
One of its providers is the Lowlands Restaurant Group, which includes Café Hollander, Trocadero and several other local restaurants.
The restaurant group’s grease is picked up about once per month, based on the fullness of its metal bin of used oil, Goggin said. Each restaurant produces about 200 pounds of used cooking oil per month.
“We have a small but growing company here in Milwaukee,” he said. “We definitely believe in trying to stay local with our dollars spending-wise.”
Providers such as the Lowlands Group are paid per gallon of grease, depending on market conditions and the amount of sediment and water in the grease, Turetsky said.
“As early as five years ago, people would pay to get rid of it – now we’re paying people close to $1 per gallon,” Turetsky said. “It’s turned into a commodity.”
Once it has been transported to the Harbor Drive facility, the grease is pumped through a basic filtration system that separates the “good stuff” from the “junk,” such as food, water and garbage, he said.
Then, the filtered oil is sent to BioVantage in Belvidere, Ill. to be converted into biodiesel. The biodiesel is then returned to the large white holding tanks Fusion leases from Tanco on the Port of Milwaukee site.
Much of the biodiesel is sold back to the City of Milwaukee for use in its diesel fleet.
“During the warmer months, we’re buying 20 percent biodiesel and during the colder months we’re buying 10 percent biodiesel,” said Jeff Tews, fleet operations manager.
The fleet started adding biodiesel to its fleet fuel in August 2006 as part of a citywide greening project, Tews said.
“We burn over a million gallons of diesel fuel, and of that million-plus gallons, you could probably say we’re about 15 percent biodiesel across the entire year,” he said.
While biodiesel is more expensive than petroleum diesel, it is a choice by the city to be environmentally sustainable, Tews said.
The service Fusion provides appeals to both the grease providers and biodiesel purchasers, Stensberg said.
“Not only are you making a renewable fuel, you’re making a local fuel,” he said. “There isn’t anybody in Milwaukee that’s doing this that I know of on a large scale.”
Grease harvesting has become profitable because it’s linked in price to biodiesel, and oil companies have started mixing biodiesel in with their product, Turetsky said.
Fusion has partnered with Madison-based Blue Honey Biofuels to share grease gathering trucks and also serves as a drop-off location for other companies that collect cooking oil.
“We haven’t grown to dominate the Milwaukee market yet, but we’ve gotten the ball rolling,” Turetsky said.
Fusion hopes to continue duplicating the program to other cities across the country, Stensberg said.
