Grease Spill Cleanups At Restaurants Are A Fact Of Life

Grease spill cleanups at restaurants are a fact of life, no matter how careful people are.

Everyone uses grease – in some form – to cook with, whether it’s the spray on/no stick variety or large kettles of fryer grease used for french fries and onion rings.

At home, most people wipe out the pan with a paper towel and throw it in the trash. But when you use the volume necessary to keep a restaurant cooking for more than 100 hours per week, you have a different problem. A much, much bigger problem.

What do you do with all that grease?

Most restaurants have a bin out back they dump the used grease and oil in. Then a recycle company hauls it away to be turned into something useful. Depending on the price of oil at the time, the restaurant either pays for the service or gets a rebate back.

The problem with this procedure is the difficulty in keeping some of the grease from slopping onto the ground. The restaurant employees usually carry it out in containers and dump it in the bin, often spilling some in the process.

Sometimes the bin gets dumped by accident when the trash company comes to pick up the dumpster. The grease bins are usually kept in the same enclosure in back of the restaurant.

And sometimes the grease recycle companies spill it, too. Usually when that happens, the whole bin gets spilled and its a huge mess.

We even got a call for a spill cleanup on the highway when one of the grease recycle companies spilled a bin on US Highway 85, also known as Santa Fe Drive.

But not all grease spills are accidents.

One of the property managers we wash shopping centers for called us when they found a restaurant had been dumping grease down the storm drain until it came out on the other side of the road!

We know because we’ve been called to cleanup all of these different messes. EPA water recovery is critical to cleaning spills the right way and its a big part of our service. Very few pressure washing businesses have the capability to do recovery.

The Editors at Cleaner Times magazine recognized us as experts and asked us to write an article on Oil and Grease Spill cleanups for the November 2013 issue of their magazine.

PACE (Partners for a Clean Environment) wrote about this problem in their latest newsletter. The article, Grease Is Gross And Illegal, offers tips on how to deal with the problem.

Wash On Wheels was the first pressure washing company to receive PACE certification. If you need grease spill cleanup services, call a company that is certified to do it the right way.