Take it to the recycling center. Even just tossing it into the trash is better than pouring it down the drain. If you toss it in the trash it will just get incinerated. If you pour it down the drain it can clog the sewage system.
The regular trash doesn’t get separated, it’s just dumped. There’s also almost no restrictions on what can go in there, our trash cans are massive, and we have to pay for recycling, so many people just don’t bother (and a second trash can is not much more than a recycling bin).
We do have a recycling service that accepts most plastics (#1-#7), and they claim to recycle it, but they have pretty strict standards (needs to be clean, need to separate caps from bottles/jugs, etc), so I wouldn’t be surprised if most of it just ends up at the landfill anyway. Our area is a “single sort” facility, meaning people just dump everything into one bin and they sort it on their end. This means workers are even more likely to just throw stuff out that isn’t easily identifiable as recyclable.
One big issue is that they don’t accept glass, so to recycle glass, you need to take it somewhere special. I’m pretty obsessive about recycling, so I go out of my way to recycle everything I can (I have a bag of dead batteries in the garage, I make regular trips to recycle glass, etc), but I highly doubt most people bother. In fact, I have a few neighbors with 2 garbage cans and no recycling can.
Wow weird. May I ask where that is? Not recycling glass sounds WILD to me, it’s one of the most common recyclables, even decades ago when plastic recycling was uncommon, glass “dumpsters” where everywhere.
Being forced to separate caps from bottles of very exotic as well, considering the EU just introduced a regulation that forces manufacturers to make caps that stay on the bottle even when opened.
We do have a few drop-off bins, but I have to drive to each of them. The going explanation is that, since we do sorting at the facility, it’s not worth exposing workers to broken glass, which is inevitable when mixing all recyclables into one garbage truck. So people have two options: drive to a drop-off location (each a few miles away and not on the way to anything) or just toss it in the trash. So, most people just toss it in the trash.
Being forced to separate caps from bottles of very exotic as well
The plastic in the caps is different from the plastic in the bottles and cannot be recycled together. I guess it’s not worth the time for them to separate at the plant (plastic recycling isn’t profitable as it is), so they put that responsibility onto trash customers (in other words, they want an excuse to just toss bottles w/ caps still on them).
I’m talking about these bottle caps btw. They’re everywhere here (milk jugs, soda, bigger ones for pasta sauce, etc).
I’m guessing more urban areas have better recycling policies since they don’t have massive landfills available for dumping.
Here we have door-to-door pick up now, which replaced dumpsters as a way to encourage recycling: you have limited pick-ups for unsorted trash, the bin has a transponder and a barcode, if you go over the limit you pay extra (albeit very little), while recyclables have unlimited pick-ups; but if they catch you putting normal trash in the recyclables they can fine you.
For door to door we sort as follows:
bags: plastic, cans and cartons (such as milk)
paper bin: cardboard and paper, but only if clean (no pizza boxes!)
compost bin: food leftovers and such, as well as used paper tissues
Then we have dumpsters for glass and dumpsters for gardening refuse, such as wood, leaves, cut grass. Now we have one for cooking oil as well.
For batteries there are usually bins near some stores or at workplaces.
Everything else you have to take to the recycling center, say metal, building materials, furniture… Usually each community has one, when I lived in the country side, my 3000-people village had its own. For furniture in some places you can arrange a curbside pick-up.
All of this is the same for urban and rural areas, though there are small differences between regions as the recycling facilities can be different. For example in some places milk cartons go in the paper bin instead of the plastic one. Of course rural in my area is probably way less rural than most of Utah.
Yeah, we’re not nearly that fancy. Here’s what we have:
blue bin - all recyclables: plastic (no bags or styrofoam), paper, cardboard, aluminum cans; must be clean
black bin - everything else; I’ll even put in grass clippings, rocks, disassembled furniture, etc
If you want to recycle glass, plastic bags, batteries, light bulbs, etc, you need to find a drop-off bin, which are relatively uncommon (plastic bag dropoff is more common now). Target is my go-to since they have the bins I need the most (glass, plastic bags), but they don’t take light bulbs or alkaline batteries. Since there are no fines for throwing stuff in the trash that shouldn’t go there and recycling bins are inconvenient, most don’t bother (and many don’t pay for the recycling bin). I’ve seen clean cardboard, batteries, and aluminum cans in the trash, and it bothers me to no end.
Black bin goes to the street every week, blue bin goes every other week. Blue bin allegedly gets sorted at the facility, the black bin is dumped straight to the landfill. There’s a weight limit for garbage, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting fined for it, and I’ve certainly gone over a few times (see: rocks).
My city has 35k people, and the larger metro area has over a half million. So we’re a medium sized metro area, with a mix of farms and high tech business areas, with two major universities. There’s no reason we can’t be better about recycling…
Almost guaranteed to be U.S.A. as it sounds almost identical to my area except we have even fewer options. Here it all goes to the landfill, you can pay for recycling cans and pickup on recycling day but it gets contaminated by people putting trash in the recycling nearly every time so it all just goes to landfill and the local government just doesn’t care
Random question, where do you take old gasoline? Will auto part stores take a jug of old motor oil and gasoline that’s been mixed? I guess I should probably just call and ask a local store after I’m done shitting on company time.
Where I live, it goes to the dump, they have a space dedicated to hazardous liquids/containers. However, you have to leave the whole container there, there’s no spot to dump it
For separated motor oil (e.g. oil changes), it can go to my local auto parts store, but gasoline and most other car fluids (e.g. coolant, transmission fluid, etc) goes to the dump as hazardous waste. My area does an event once or twice each year to collect all of those hazardous materials, so it’s worth checking that out as well, since it can be way more convenient than waiting in a line at the dump.
The landfill stuff doesn’t eventually turn into dirt. They purposefully make sure that it’s wrapped in plastic in such a way that it never decomposes. Landfills are terrible.
They do it to protect the water table from things like battery acid. But a good chunk of it will become dirt, because there’s enough organic matter in mixed trash to decompose. It’ll just take a really long time because of the mix of plastic and whatnot.
WM at least has rules that every load of trash must be in individual bags, and they must be tied. So you’re not getting that mix you’re talking about. Their goal (every landfill) is to make sure that nothing breaks down as it costs more to deal with (like leachate and methane).
Ours doesn’t have those rules, and I and my neighbors put all kinds of crap in there: tree branches, lawn clippings, rocks, disassembled furniture, rotten food. If it fits, it goes in. And our bins are pretty big, so a lot goes in there. The main reasons to bag are to prevent the bin from getting too stinky and to keep stuff from blowing out if the wind flips the lid. AFAICT, there’s no policy about what goes in the bin, other than hazardous materials like batteries (which they plan for because a lot of people toss those in as well).
There are ways to make it harden for bin disposal, but if I’m feeling cheeky I just put used oil back in the plastic jug once it’s cooled down and bin that
I save the plastic grocery store bags and use those. Since they frequently have holes, I double or sometimes triple bag it, depending on how nasty the oil is and how much I’ll regret not taking the time later if it seeps into my garbage bin.
My city actually has us pouring our oil in the compost bins. But in ye olde days, my parents would collect all the oil in the big yogurt containers/milk jugs and then throw it in the trash.
I should have specified: my municipality lets us throw any cooking oil out into our compost, and we have special containers in our compost bins specifically for cooking oils. So I’m assuming they get rid of it some way that isn’t actually in the compost.
If small amounts of oil that hardens when at room temp, like bacon fat. Throw it in a tin can to cool, garbage when the can fills. Oil that doesn’t harden, personally I put a bunch of dish soap into the oily pan to absorb the oil and wash it down the sink. Not sure if the dish soap does enough but seems safe to me.
If its a large amount, like for deep frying. Local recycling might take it. I know curbside pickup will take used motor oil for me, so I imagine they’d take fryer oil too.
I don’t do it with lots of oil. I mentioned putting bacon fat in a tin can, so we’re talking less than you’d get cooking bacon. See my other reply about semantics of absorb. For small amounts, the oil will emulsify with the soap. Which then can be rinsed away with water. This is how it makes your dishes clean, I’m sure it works the same down the drain.
Everyone else is upset about absorbing the oil. I’m way more upset that you’re throwing out perfectly good bacon grease that can be used in any number of dishes.
Tortillas are the number one thing! But if you don’t need new tortillas (I can’t imagine why but some folks don’t have tortillas with nearly every meal, or so I’ve heard) it’s also great for sauteing pretty much anything.
soap molecules can break the oil molecules into smaller ones and allow the water molecules attached to them to surround the smaller oil fragments, creating an emulsion.
Is close enough in plain english to absorb the oil.
So… What are you supposed to do with oil if not pouring it down the drain?
Take it to the recycling center. Even just tossing it into the trash is better than pouring it down the drain. If you toss it in the trash it will just get incinerated. If you pour it down the drain it can clog the sewage system.
“it will just get incinerated”
Look at you, living in a country where they actually do something with trash instead of just accumulating it in a huge field
Going to the dump is so weird. It’s just like, here’s a field…just throw your shit wherever and let’s get outta here.
Better for fighting Climate Change. Unless your incinerators are burning hotter than anything our regulators would ever enforce.
It eventually becomes a huge hill, then we can build a ski slope on it.
I know a place where they did exactly this.
You have incinerators in your area? Everything in my area is landfill, so it will eventually become dirt.
Do plastics go in the landfill too? Or is it somehow separated so that only stuff that decays in years rather than centuries goes there?
The regular trash doesn’t get separated, it’s just dumped. There’s also almost no restrictions on what can go in there, our trash cans are massive, and we have to pay for recycling, so many people just don’t bother (and a second trash can is not much more than a recycling bin).
We do have a recycling service that accepts most plastics (#1-#7), and they claim to recycle it, but they have pretty strict standards (needs to be clean, need to separate caps from bottles/jugs, etc), so I wouldn’t be surprised if most of it just ends up at the landfill anyway. Our area is a “single sort” facility, meaning people just dump everything into one bin and they sort it on their end. This means workers are even more likely to just throw stuff out that isn’t easily identifiable as recyclable.
One big issue is that they don’t accept glass, so to recycle glass, you need to take it somewhere special. I’m pretty obsessive about recycling, so I go out of my way to recycle everything I can (I have a bag of dead batteries in the garage, I make regular trips to recycle glass, etc), but I highly doubt most people bother. In fact, I have a few neighbors with 2 garbage cans and no recycling can.
Wow weird. May I ask where that is? Not recycling glass sounds WILD to me, it’s one of the most common recyclables, even decades ago when plastic recycling was uncommon, glass “dumpsters” where everywhere.
Being forced to separate caps from bottles of very exotic as well, considering the EU just introduced a regulation that forces manufacturers to make caps that stay on the bottle even when opened.
Utah, USA.
We do have a few drop-off bins, but I have to drive to each of them. The going explanation is that, since we do sorting at the facility, it’s not worth exposing workers to broken glass, which is inevitable when mixing all recyclables into one garbage truck. So people have two options: drive to a drop-off location (each a few miles away and not on the way to anything) or just toss it in the trash. So, most people just toss it in the trash.
The plastic in the caps is different from the plastic in the bottles and cannot be recycled together. I guess it’s not worth the time for them to separate at the plant (plastic recycling isn’t profitable as it is), so they put that responsibility onto trash customers (in other words, they want an excuse to just toss bottles w/ caps still on them).
I’m talking about these bottle caps btw. They’re everywhere here (milk jugs, soda, bigger ones for pasta sauce, etc).
I’m guessing more urban areas have better recycling policies since they don’t have massive landfills available for dumping.
Here we have door-to-door pick up now, which replaced dumpsters as a way to encourage recycling: you have limited pick-ups for unsorted trash, the bin has a transponder and a barcode, if you go over the limit you pay extra (albeit very little), while recyclables have unlimited pick-ups; but if they catch you putting normal trash in the recyclables they can fine you.
For door to door we sort as follows:
Then we have dumpsters for glass and dumpsters for gardening refuse, such as wood, leaves, cut grass. Now we have one for cooking oil as well.
For batteries there are usually bins near some stores or at workplaces.
Everything else you have to take to the recycling center, say metal, building materials, furniture… Usually each community has one, when I lived in the country side, my 3000-people village had its own. For furniture in some places you can arrange a curbside pick-up.
All of this is the same for urban and rural areas, though there are small differences between regions as the recycling facilities can be different. For example in some places milk cartons go in the paper bin instead of the plastic one. Of course rural in my area is probably way less rural than most of Utah.
As for caps, yeah, those are now attached to the bottle.. I guess the recycling facility has a way to separate and sort them.
Yeah, we’re not nearly that fancy. Here’s what we have:
If you want to recycle glass, plastic bags, batteries, light bulbs, etc, you need to find a drop-off bin, which are relatively uncommon (plastic bag dropoff is more common now). Target is my go-to since they have the bins I need the most (glass, plastic bags), but they don’t take light bulbs or alkaline batteries. Since there are no fines for throwing stuff in the trash that shouldn’t go there and recycling bins are inconvenient, most don’t bother (and many don’t pay for the recycling bin). I’ve seen clean cardboard, batteries, and aluminum cans in the trash, and it bothers me to no end.
Black bin goes to the street every week, blue bin goes every other week. Blue bin allegedly gets sorted at the facility, the black bin is dumped straight to the landfill. There’s a weight limit for garbage, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting fined for it, and I’ve certainly gone over a few times (see: rocks).
My city has 35k people, and the larger metro area has over a half million. So we’re a medium sized metro area, with a mix of farms and high tech business areas, with two major universities. There’s no reason we can’t be better about recycling…
Almost guaranteed to be U.S.A. as it sounds almost identical to my area except we have even fewer options. Here it all goes to the landfill, you can pay for recycling cans and pickup on recycling day but it gets contaminated by people putting trash in the recycling nearly every time so it all just goes to landfill and the local government just doesn’t care
Random question, where do you take old gasoline? Will auto part stores take a jug of old motor oil and gasoline that’s been mixed? I guess I should probably just call and ask a local store after I’m done shitting on company time.
Where I live, it goes to the dump, they have a space dedicated to hazardous liquids/containers. However, you have to leave the whole container there, there’s no spot to dump it
Same.
For separated motor oil (e.g. oil changes), it can go to my local auto parts store, but gasoline and most other car fluids (e.g. coolant, transmission fluid, etc) goes to the dump as hazardous waste. My area does an event once or twice each year to collect all of those hazardous materials, so it’s worth checking that out as well, since it can be way more convenient than waiting in a line at the dump.
The landfill stuff doesn’t eventually turn into dirt. They purposefully make sure that it’s wrapped in plastic in such a way that it never decomposes. Landfills are terrible.
They do it to protect the water table from things like battery acid. But a good chunk of it will become dirt, because there’s enough organic matter in mixed trash to decompose. It’ll just take a really long time because of the mix of plastic and whatnot.
WM at least has rules that every load of trash must be in individual bags, and they must be tied. So you’re not getting that mix you’re talking about. Their goal (every landfill) is to make sure that nothing breaks down as it costs more to deal with (like leachate and methane).
Ours doesn’t have those rules, and I and my neighbors put all kinds of crap in there: tree branches, lawn clippings, rocks, disassembled furniture, rotten food. If it fits, it goes in. And our bins are pretty big, so a lot goes in there. The main reasons to bag are to prevent the bin from getting too stinky and to keep stuff from blowing out if the wind flips the lid. AFAICT, there’s no policy about what goes in the bin, other than hazardous materials like batteries (which they plan for because a lot of people toss those in as well).
Take it to your local recycling center, if they have the means to collect it.
Drink it.
Put it on the doorhandles of the neighbours you don’t like
I pour it into the air intake vents of cars that were parked by assholes, but only when I’m out of eggs to crack in there instead.
Truly my bred’ren
I’ve heard you can use it to lubricate outdoor-facing hinges. Might work well for squeaky fence gates
There are ways to make it harden for bin disposal, but if I’m feeling cheeky I just put used oil back in the plastic jug once it’s cooled down and bin that
That’s the worst pickup line I ever heard.
My wife has responded to lines nearly that bad, but I’ll report back with any success. 🫡
So?
bzzzz 🔴
I save the plastic grocery store bags and use those. Since they frequently have holes, I double or sometimes triple bag it, depending on how nasty the oil is and how much I’ll regret not taking the time later if it seeps into my garbage bin.
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You can use this to turn it into napalm: Waste Cooking Oil Powder (pack of 6) https://a.co/d/3WIT6Ff
Take it to the recycling center? Here they recently introduced a few oil dumpsters as well
My city actually has us pouring our oil in the compost bins. But in ye olde days, my parents would collect all the oil in the big yogurt containers/milk jugs and then throw it in the trash.
This should only be done for vegetable based oils.
Well yes, I’m not throwing motor oil in my compost am I?
I was referring to seed-based oils.
It should go without saying that motor oil is also inappropriate, yes
I should have specified: my municipality lets us throw any cooking oil out into our compost, and we have special containers in our compost bins specifically for cooking oils. So I’m assuming they get rid of it some way that isn’t actually in the compost.
Ah I thought you meant for composting at home. My Mum only ever let us put vegetable oil in the compost, and even then only small amounts.
In my city the sanitation company sends a truck to drive around and collect it from people once a month.
If you have a diesel car it’ll run on it. (disclaimer: I have never tried this, if it screws up your engine it’s your own fault)
If small amounts of oil that hardens when at room temp, like bacon fat. Throw it in a tin can to cool, garbage when the can fills. Oil that doesn’t harden, personally I put a bunch of dish soap into the oily pan to absorb the oil and wash it down the sink. Not sure if the dish soap does enough but seems safe to me.
If its a large amount, like for deep frying. Local recycling might take it. I know curbside pickup will take used motor oil for me, so I imagine they’d take fryer oil too.
That’s not how that works. You’re wrecking your pipes.
I don’t do it with lots of oil. I mentioned putting bacon fat in a tin can, so we’re talking less than you’d get cooking bacon. See my other reply about semantics of absorb. For small amounts, the oil will emulsify with the soap. Which then can be rinsed away with water. This is how it makes your dishes clean, I’m sure it works the same down the drain.
I’m not sure why you’re getting so many downvotes, your system seems reasonable to me!
Everyone else is upset about absorbing the oil. I’m way more upset that you’re throwing out perfectly good bacon grease that can be used in any number of dishes.
That stuff is like gold. Best thing for tortillas
Tortillas are the number one thing! But if you don’t need new tortillas (I can’t imagine why but some folks don’t have tortillas with nearly every meal, or so I’ve heard) it’s also great for sauteing pretty much anything.
all science people are in pain right now
We’re not in science class.
https://sciencing.com/adding-soap-oil-water-7408600.html
Is close enough in plain english to absorb the oil.
No, it’s not.
Absorption /= emulsification. Nor does it equal adsorption.
They’re different, and have different properties.
An emulsification can be broken by agitation or introduction of another substance.
Soap and water do not absorb oil.
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How dare you call mean science-person! I’m a proud moron and can feel the pain!
I wish our recycling took oil, but I’m not convinced they even recycle the things they do take. It’s definitely worth checking though.