24/7 Commercial Service in NJ, PA and DE
D&W Alternative Energy is the leading used cooking oil recycling company in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, offering prompt, clean, and professional restaurant cooking oil disposal to support your commercial kitchen. We offer:
D&W serves cooking facilities throughout New Jersey, Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania.
D&W Alternative Energy is focused on you. While other companies may offer a variety of services for a variety of different clients, used cooking oil is all we do. That means the restaurants we serve are our number one priority. And as a local company, we are dedicated to serving facilities in New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania.
We use proprietary tracking, scheduling, and routing software to ensure your typical needs are automatically taken care of. But if you encounter an unusual circumstance that requires an additional pickup, you can always give us a call and we’ll be there within 24 hours.
Don’t let big company contracts scare you. Call D&W: we will work with you to figure out your options.
D&W offers hands-free indoor direct connect systems at little to no cost to our clients. And we are confident we can keep our clients with reliable and superior customer service, so we don’t ask them to sign punitive contracts. Plus, we will continue to pay used cooking oil rebates to clients with these systems! Read more about the benefits of direct-connect systems here.
D&W serves cooking facilities throughout New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.
Yes! Recycle your grease with confidence. D&W is fully insured.
Used Cooking Oils are fats and oils that have been used in cooking by restaurants, food processors and consumer households and are often collected by used cooking oil recycling companies such as D&W Alternative Energy in Trenton, New Jersey, which picks up oil from restaurants in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.
Most UCO is derived from vegetable oils that have been used in cooking but it may also have animal fats mixed in, as meat cooks and fat from beef, pork and chicken renders. Large quantities of used cooking oil that need to be recycled typically come from deep fryers, but recyclers can also use cooking oil that was used in sauteing or shallow frying foods on the stove or drippings from rotisserie chicken.
UCO may also contain trace amounts of water and food particles but may not contain brown grease which is food industry waste that is captured in grease traps. Too much of any of these contaminants will make the oil unrecyclable.
We produce UCO by cooking foodstuffs in vegetable oil or animal fat and then draining the used oil into containers. In your home, that might just mean a few drops of oil left in the pan after cooking. However, restaurants often use many gallons of cooking oil each day. When the oil is no longer usable, restaurant staff pour or drain the oil into dedicated containers to store until it can be picked up by a used cooking oil recycling company for recycling.
Restaurants can filter and polish their used cooking oil to extend its useful life as cooking oil. Filtering involves straining burned food pieces from the oil and running the oil through a filtration machine. Filtration machines are not cheap but they are very worthwhile when compared with the amount of oil you would need if not filtering. Filtering your oil can make it last up to 50 percent longer than it would if you didn’t filter it. Some fryers such as those from Pitco and Henny Penny come with automatic filtration built into the fryer.
Polishing your oil with a chemical filter powder removes protein, blood and other impurities that mechanical filtering can miss. This is especially important in fryers that handle meat, fish and poultry. And with prices of cooking oil skyrocketing 152% from 2020 to 2022, filtering and polishing becomes more imperative.
Cooking oil begins to deteriorate with the first use. The combination of heat from cooking and water released from the food as it cooks leads to three major chemical changes: the fatty acids oxidize, the fatty acids polymerize and the triglycerides hydrolyze, breaking into free fatty acids and glycerol. The longer your food cooks and the higher the oil’s temperature, the more your oil will deteriorate. As it goes through these three processes, it produces new compounds: aldehydes, ketones and alcohols. At first, these chemicals actually improve the flavor of your fried foods, but if as they accumulate they can become toxic.
Before your oil becomes dangerous, it can stop your food from tasting its best. Throughout the cooking process, small pieces of food can break off and stay in the oil, eventually burning and releasing more compounds into the food. This also makes your oil start smoking at lower temperatures. Over time food won’t taste as good and foodstuffs you want to be crispy become sodden with oil. A smoking oil can impart an acrid, burnt flavor to your food.
You can extend the life of your cooking oil with filtering and polishing to remove these extra food particles and keep the smoke point higher, but any oil you use to cook must eventually be recycled. The number of times cooking oil can be reused for cooking varies with a number of factors from the type of foods you cook to the temperature of cooking to the type of oil used.
Some parts of the world produce what is referred to as gutter oil, by reusing cooking oil longer than they should, pulling grease from grease traps and waste from slaughterhouses, reprocessing the combination and then selling it as cooking oil. Needless to say this is not a recommended cooking practice. In China and Taiwan the penalties for selling gutter oil can be severe. But it happens.
Olive oil is liquid at 68 degrees fahrenheit but starts to solidify around 54 degrees and becomes completely solid around 44 degrees F. So, if you pour oil down the sink when it’s liquid, it can solidify and you end up with clogged pipes, backups, fines, citations and damage to your restaurant. The backups can cause problems for the neighboring kitchens and New Jersey, Philadelphia or Delaware community, not just your own home or restaurant.
This restaurant dumped its used cooking oil directly into wastewater pipes and found out the hard way the damage that causes. “The first problem is that this is a health and safety issue for the residents that live around those establishments,” said Gary Brown from DWSD(Detroit Water and Sewage Dept.). “Popeyes could be held liable for the damages. We’re going to talk to the corporate office and make them aware of damages that were found at those residential homes.”
That oil also makes its way into the municipal water system fouling water and damaging public waterways and aquatic animals. Numerous reports of fatbergs detail the result of cooking oil and other contaminants making their way into public waterways. Removing fatbergs in below ground water systems can cost local communities millions of dollars.
Since the Clean Water Act of 1972, the EPA has regulated what can be discharged into public waterways, which in turn regulates what restaurants must do with used cooking oil. Illegal discharge of cooking oil can harm the restaurant, public waterways and your neighbors. The ramifications in terms of fines, citations and closures can be substantial.
Experts do not recommend composting cooking oil, except in very small quantities. Composting cooking oil can result in leaching of oils into aquifers and the creation of odors which attract rodents. Recycling is the preferred solution for disposing of used cooking oil.
Once used cooking oil has been recycled what becomes of it? UCO can be made into a number of valuable products. It can be made into animal feed or used in soaps and cosmetics. By far the most valuable use of UCO is to make biodiesel, renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). In 2022 aviation accounted for 2% of global C02 emissions, having grown faster in recent decades than rail, road or shipping. There is a skyrocketing demand for sustainable aviation fuel driven in part by the White House SAF Grand Challenge which set a goal of 3 billion gallons of SAF by 2030 and 100% of expected domestic commercial jet fuel use by 2050.
The use of biofuels as a substitute for regular diesel means up to an 86% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. A 2017 study by the EPA found that hotels and restaurants produce 3 billion gallons of used cooking oil each year. That 3 billion gallons transformed into biodiesel could reduce demand for diesel by 10% (2021).
When D&W Alternative Energy collects your used cooking oils in New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Delaware, we bring it back to our local warehouse in Trenton, NJ, where we process it to remove impurities and water, then we ship it to biodiesel producers in the United States who use it to make the products mentioned above.
Learn more about why restaurants should recycle used cooking oil here.
Restaurants build relationships with companies like D&W Alternative Energy to come pick up their used cooking oil. These companies provide the service because once they collect a large enough volume of oil, they can start to purify it and sell it to companies that use it to make products like biodiesel.
Learn more about who recycles used cooking oil here.
Learn more about how restaurants recycle used cooking oil here.
The global market for UCO was 3.7B gallons in 2022 and is expected to reach 5 to 10B gallons in 2030. Across the world, only a small portion of available UCO is actually collected and recycled. The lack of established infrastructure (trucks, logistics) prevents additional collection in some countries. It’s rare for companies to pick up UCO from households, as it isn’t economically feasible to pick up the small quantities used in our homes. Though some townships allow home cooks to drop off their oil at designated UCO drop-off locations, they only capture a small amount of the oil we actually use. The rest finds its way into the trash or even our pipes. If the impediments to collecting UCO from households can be overcome the market potential is much greater than 10B gallons.
An effective process for collecting and recycling used cooking oil has become critical to effective restaurant operations. The food service industry suffers losses of $12B per year due to slips, falls and burns, most of which are associated with cooking oil. To run a successful restaurant, you need to keep restaurant employees safe, the kitchen clean and prevent losses. Insurance claims and workman’s comp claims are essential components of operating a successful restaurant. Technology is key to kitchen safety and the financial success of restaurants.
And the food services industry is not one size fits all. Imagine for a moment the cooking oil recycling challenges that come with kitchen configurations like these:
D&W Alternative Energy has designed cooking oil recycling solutions for all of these set ups. We customize our solutions to meet the needs of our customers. The videos in this blog show some of the solutions used to meet the needs of our customers.
Call D&W to start service in New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania or Delaware
(609) 902-5093
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