Yellow Grease Recycling, Graded and Documented on Every Load

Yellow grease is used frying oil collected from cooking equipment and kept clean enough to sell as fuel feedstock. The classification is set by acid content: used grease under 15 percent free fatty acid is yellow grease, and above 15 percent it is brown grease. Interceptor waste is a different material entirely. It is pumped out of a trap, can run as high as 98 percent free fatty acid, is solid at room temperature, arrives heavily emulsified with water, and carries food solids and trash. The other two are processing problems that cost money to handle. Fryer oil kept dry and separate is a product that pays for its own collection. That is why the streams are never combined in one container, and why the collection record for each commercial load has to name which material was picked up.

Buyers grade on free fatty acid plus MIU, which is the sum of moisture, insoluble impurities, and unsaponifiable matter. The acid number drives the price because those acids react with the alkali catalyst used in biodiesel production and turn into soap rather than fuel, which eats catalyst and slows the reaction. Under roughly 3 to 4 percent, a producer can process the oil conventionally with extra catalyst; past that, it needs vacuum distillation or acid esterification first, and that cost gets discounted out of the purchase price. MIU is priced as dead weight, since none of it can be converted. In practice the biggest single lever inside a kitchen is water: rain through an open lid, wash-down water, or a mop bucket emptied into the container adds weight that will never become fuel and accelerates the acid split while the oil waits for pickup. Filtering on schedule and keeping the container closed protects more value than anything else you can do.

It is priced off an open market rather than set as a service line item. USDA Market News posts regional bids weekly in cents per pound in its National Animal By-Product Feedstuff Report, which quotes three separate regions in this state plus a Pacific Northwest region covering Tacoma. Each region is quoted on two bases: FOB, meaning priced at the collection point, and delivered, meaning priced at the receiving facility. The gap between them is freight, which is significant on a heavy liquid moved in small increments. The published range moves with renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel demand, soybean oil prices, and federal and state fuel policy, and it is genuinely volatile. The report shows year-ago bids alongside current ones, and swings of 20 cents a pound within a single region over a year are ordinary rather than unusual.

Collection is free, and that is not a promotional rate. The container, the scheduled pickups, the metering, and the paperwork cost you nothing, because we are paid for the material when it is delivered to a licensed renderer. There is no service fee, no rental, no fuel surcharge, and no contract or minimum volume. For larger producers, roughly 250 gallons a month and up, there can be more to discuss than free service. Volume, grade, container access, and how far the location sits from the route all factor in, so it is a conversation rather than a published rate. Contact us with your fryer count and your typical oil change schedule and we will tell you straight what your volume supports.

Under California Code of Regulations Title 3, Section 1180.24, a commercial transporter must complete a manifest for every load. Required fields include the transporter name and the department-issued decal number, your name and address as the generator, the date and time of collection, the material type, the amount collected, the printed name and signature of an on-site representative at your location, the driver name and signature, the receiving facility name and address, the date, time and amount received, the signature of a responsible individual at that facility, and a consecutive manifest number. Both the generator and the transporter must keep those records for not less than two years. Two years is the legal minimum, not a best practice. We retain digital copies for two years as company policy, and your full history stays exportable from your dashboard.

Check the registry. CDFA maintains a public Inedible Kitchen Grease transporter lookup you can search by company name, license number, or county. The rules are blunt about why this matters: the CDFA rendering program states that it is unlawful to engage in the transportation of inedible kitchen grease without being registered, and that a licensed renderer, licensed collection center, or registered transporter may not take possession of that material from an unregistered transporter. The program also caps personal transporters at one vehicle and no more than 165 gallons, and bars them from selling, bartering or trading at all, so anyone arriving with a pickup truck and a drum offering to buy your oil is operating outside the rules. Every pickup on our routes is completed by a CDFA-registered transporter, and the decal number appears on your manifest where you can see it.

It goes to a licensed renderer, which is the receiving facility, not a middle stop. There the load is tested, heated to drive off moisture, and filtered to pull out food solids and insoluble impurities, leaving a feedstock that meets the specification a fuel producer will accept. From there it enters the EPA Renewable Fuel Standard system. The agency lists approved pathways for renewable fuel that include biogenic waste oils and fats as feedstock for biodiesel, renewable diesel, renewable jet fuel and heating oil under D-code 4, plus additional advanced pathways under D-code 5. Nothing is landfilled and nothing is untracked. Your manifest history shows which facility took each load and on what date, which is the documentation an auditor or a corporate sustainability team actually asks to see.

Six markets: Orange County, Los Angeles, San Diego, the Inland Empire, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Tacoma and Pierce County in Washington. Coverage inside each market is dense rather than scattered, which is what keeps routes tight and pickups predictable. If you run multiple locations across more than one of those markets, they can sit under one account with one consolidated pickup history rather than six separate relationships. Call and a real person answers, any hour of the day. Callbacks go out the same business day, and a first pickup is normally on the schedule within 3 to 5 business days.