Fry Your Food, Then Recycle the Evidence

Growing up in a household that cooked a lot of southern soul food, I saw my mother, grandmother, and aunts cook their dishes with some of the best ingredients that would just make your mouth water watching them prepare these foods.  Along with these wonderful ingredients I also watched them cook with plenty of lard and cooking oil.  My mother would always keep her old cooking oil in one of those big Crisco cans and store them to be used at a later time.  She still does do this until this day and now that I have began doing a lot of the cooking in the family I do the same thing.  At least we know not to put them down the drain, but I often wondered "Do we keep this forever?"

Well, while doing some research for some resources in Portland available to the community, I came across a fairly new resource for those living in the Portland area to be able dispose of their cooking oil.  Just last year Far West Fibers and Portland Recycling Centers are taking these cooking oils and are using them to be converted into biodiesels which is a cleaner burning alternative fuel for vehicles that take diesel fuel. I thought this to be a really great thing and couldn't believe that we (Portlanders) were just now getting this resource available to us.

So instead of hanging on to those cans and containers of old cooking oil, we can take these down to the recycling centers and will be contributing to a renewable source and the future.  Now hopefully that we can get rid of the cooking oil maybe we can make some steps to reducing our consumption...but it just makes fried chicken taste so good!
You can learn more about bio-diesels and other alternative fuels sources on our website.
Check out the press release for this resource at http://encoreoils.com/downloads/Portland_UCO_Recycling.pdf