New program works to ‘Cease the Grease’

In 2004, Dallas was having an overflow problem, a sanitary sewer overflow problem to be exact.  The problem was so awful, the city was forced to come up with a new campaign: Cease the Grease.

On Nov. 15, at a Sustainability Exchange open forum held in S-101, a representative from the Dallas Water Utilities spoke about the new program.

Cease the Grease is an education and outreach program used to teach Dallas residents about the proper disposal of grease while lowering the number of sanitary sewer overflows in the city.

"What happens is the sewer pipe that's underneath the street gets clogged with grease, and the wastewater has to go somewhere," said Helen Cantril Dulac, outreach coordinator of Cease the Grease. "So that's raw sewage now on the streets and, of course, this is an environmental health hazard."

Dallas had so many sanitary sewer overflows that it caught the attention of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

"They said ‘Dallas, you guys have got to do something about it, and because you've had so many of these, we're fining you $800,000 and putting you on a special plan to correct these measures,'" Dulac said.

The Grease Abatement Program sends out people to set up bins where local residents can drop off their cooking grease and oil in sealable plastic containers.

The grease is then picked up by representatives from Dallas County Schools which recycles it into biofuel.  Biofuel is then mixed with regular fuel used to run the school district's 1,700 buses.

So far, the program, which has a bin stationed next to the L Building in the W-2 parking lot, has been successful since its first day at Eastfield nearly nine weeks ago.

"We were caught by surprise," Michael Brantley, assistant director of Facilities, said of the first day the station was up.

"This person was trying to chase me down, wondering where the Cease the Grease station was located. So we parked and they were unloading two big loads of grease from the truck. I said, ‘Whoa! We can't take that much,' so we got as much as we could. I'm going to say it was 5-10 gallons of cooking oil."

The popularity of the program has continued to skyrocket.

"The use of the [Cease the Grease bin] out there has been so extensive, the doors wore off," said Dr. Terrance Wickman, coordinator of the college's Green Team.

Eastfield is just one of the locations for Cease the Grease collections. Every other DCCCD campus has a bin, and there are 15 other locations around Dallas, including four Whole Foods stores and three fire stations located around the city.

"We know convenience is the key. If it's not convenient, people aren't going to drive somewhere to drop [the grease] off," Dulac said.

To find more locations, log on to ceasethegrease.org.