It’s the next-best thing to stealing gasoline.
Yellow grease, the byproduct of deep frying, is now a tracked commodity thanks to the advent of biofuels. Restaurant staff empty grease traps into a tank, then a rendering company picks up the grease and converts it into a useful fuel, or for use in other products like animal feed or soap.
Usually.
With a gallon of yellow grease priced as high as $3 or more, thieves nationwide have taken to pilfering the used oil in the wee hours of the morning. That’s one of the reasons N.C. Rep. John Torbett, R-Gaston, filed a bill to set criminal penalties on the act. The bill became law on Jan. 1.
Under state law, it’s illegal to steal “waste kitchen grease” or the container it sits in, intentionally damage the container or contaminate the grease, or place a label showing your ownership of a grease container while knowing it belongs to someone else.
Committing any one of these acts is a Class 1 misdemeanor. If the theft or damage rises above $1,000, it becomes a Class H felony.
As a commodity, the price of yellow grease changes daily and prices vary nationwide. But, at a price of 40 cents per pound, someone would have to make off with more than 300 gallons of grease to reach the felony threshold.
The law also mandates grease collectors to have $1 million in liability insurance and provide necessary documentation showing ownership of the grease.
Outright support of the law appears to be hard to find. Early reports on this effort and similar ones nationwide tend to spark apathy or derision. The insurance provision in particular has been pointed out as particularly daunting to smaller grease rendering firms.
The state-funded Biofuels Center of North Carolina, established by the General Assembly to promote alternatives to petroleum-based fuel, takes a straight-line approach to the matter.
“I don’t see any large implications, from my perspective. Breaking the law is breaking the law — stealing is bad, and this law tries to address that,” said Wil Glenn, Biofuels Center director of communications and public affairs.
Zack Hamm, owner of Triangle Biofuels Industries in Wilson, said dealing with theft is a regular part of doing business.
“The irony is, whenever the price of anything goes up, people are going to start stealing it,” he said. “This has been going on for five or six years, and the law isn’t really going to help a whole lot of anything, to tell you the truth. It’s a pretty useless law.”
Hamm said his company uses locks on its tanks, but that it doesn’t stop the more-motivated criminal.
Lenoir County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Chris Hill said he recently received the books of new state laws, but agrees that enforceability could pose a problem.
“You’re going to just about to have to catch somebody with the cooking oil,” he said.
A New York Times story from January 2012 tells of a Sacramento, Calif. grease collector two months earlier who found thieves stole grease from 20 of the 22 tanks on his route. But, that level of larceny may have not yet reached Lenoir County.
Hill said he was unaware grease theft was a problem, and Kinston Department of Public Safety spokesman Woody Spencer echoed the same thoughts.
“I’ve not heard of grease being stolen in Kinston, to my knowledge,” Spencer said. “I’ve been here almost 12 years, and I’ve not heard of any.”
Steve Lovick of Lovick’s Café hasn’t heard of any problems either, but admits there are plenty of people who are interested in his restaurant’s grease. He said it’s simply easier to contract with a rendering company than work out deals with people who have personal or small-scale operations.
“Of course, (rendering companies) pay us for the oil they pick up,” Lovick said. “They didn’t used to, but they do now. But, people will come in and ask, ‘What do you do with your oil?’ They’re looking to maybe get it, or they want to come get it, but when you start trying to deal with the public — the devil with them getting it, you’d be running over, or they wouldn’t come get it when you needed it.”
If the national trend tracks here, people may start coming for the grease without asking first.
Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 or wes.wolfe@kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter at WolfeReports.