From the SF Chronicle (oh, local newspaper, I love you so…):
San Francisco will become the first city in the country to convert large batches of “brown grease” – the smelly, mucky mess left over from foods cooked in oil – into biodiesel and other fuels under a program set to start by the end of the year.
The $1.2 million pilot program, which is being funded by state and federal grants, will go toward building a grease recycling plant near the city’s Oceanside treatment plant. The program will allow the city to collect about 10,000 gallons a week of dirty grease, which can be converted into roughly 500 gallons of fuel.
“At home, when you’re making eggs and it burns and you get that brown stuff and you scrape it off, that’s what brown grease in essence is,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said at a news conference Wednesday. “But it also becomes commercial-grade biodiesel. This is the good stuff, environmentally speaking.
