Molly Murray

The News Journal

Think our neighbors to the south corner the market on all-things fried, what with their southern fried chicken, fried okra and fried green tomatoes?

Fried wannabes.

This week the epicenter of fried is in Harrington at the Delaware State Fair.

There is fried lemonade, fried pickles, fried twinkies, fried mushrooms, fried candy, fried Oreos and fried bubble gum. Plus your usual fair-fried pleasures like blooming onions, ribbon potatoes, corn dogs, french fries, elephant ears and the queen of fried fair food: funnel cakes, dusted with powdered sugar.

The big question then is what to do with all that used grease?

"Our ultimate goal is to recycle all we can," said Danny Aguilar, assistant general manager and director of marketing for the fair.

That doesn't mean cleaning the grease so it fries again another day. Instead, all those dozens of fried-food vendors clean out their deep fryers -- just before the grease breaks down -- and add the waste to green barrels stationed near all the food facilities. You probably wouldn't even know they were there if you weren't looking for them.

The fair's grease recycling contractor, Valley Proteins Inc., picks it up and then they turn it into things like animal feed additives and clean-burning biodiesel.

At Danny and Laurie's Pennsylvania Dutch Funnel Cakes around the corner from where the mechanical bull throws cowboys and cowgirls for a loop, Vicky Preston knows a thing or two about grease. She's been making funnel cakes since she was 16 and is now in her 47th year or fairs and festivals.

It takes 27 1/2 gallons of oil to fill the deep fat fryer in the stand, she said. That's 5 1/2, five-gallon jugs of vegetable oil. It needs changing about every three days, maybe more if the fryer is especially busy, she said. Preston cooks each funnel cake to order, the batter-dipped Oreos, too.

Next to the barrels there are the empty containers: Magic Chef creamy liquid shortening, Pro-Fry liquid shortening, vegetable frying oil.

As Aguilar said, everything that can be recycled, is. That means plastic and cardboard.

In all, the 10-day run of the fair racks up 41.25 tons of cardboard that is recycled and transported by fair staff to the Delaware Solid Waste Authority Transfer Station near Milford.

As for bottles, fair vendors have almost completely shifted to plastic. Bins around the fairgrounds are used to catch that plastic waste stream, which is recycled, too.

And then there is Trouble, the dairy cow.

As every farm kid knows, food in equals waste out. Basic biology.

So far this week, the Kerrick kids, who live at Fairhope Farms in Greenwood when they aren't at the State Fair, have mucked plenty of cow stalls.

Trouble, born on Valentines Day, 2015, was true to her name. She belongs to 10-year-old Avery Kerrick. Trouble's sleek, brown coat was perfect as she stood in her stall early this week.

Next thing Avery's older sister Mackenna, knew, that perfect brown coat had an unsightly and stinky blemish from a cow flop. To the washstand, Trouble went for a quick rinse.

"Usually we just clean them in the morning," Mackenna said. "But sometimes we wash them off."

It's all in a day's work.

"They're here every day," said dad C.K. Kerrick. "It's kind of a family tradition. We kind of hope they'll be able to pass it on."

All that manure is collected and processed onsite, Aguilar said. The fair has a nutrient management plan it follows as it recycles its animal waste, he said.

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The state fairground covers over 300 acres and more than 200,000 are expected to visit the annual event this year.

In 2006, fair officials tried a pilot recycling program collecting aluminum cans, plastic bottles and cardboard in containers placed throughout the fair ground. That first year, they collected 252 pounds of plastic and 135 pounds of aluminum. They recycled 7,080 pounds of cardboard.

The following year, they doubled the amount of plastic and aluminum.

The program has continued to grow.

But Aguilar said there are some things they can't recycle. So much of the paper used to serve food is contaminated and because of that can't be recycled, he said. On average, it adds up to some five to 8 tons of trash every day that fill more than 400 containers throughout the fairgrounds, he said. Those containers are emptied at the end of each night and again, typically, around 4 p.m. as crowds start arriving for the "dinner rush," he said. When it gets really busy, the cans are emptied more often, he said.

There are also some unexpected items in the waste stream.

In the sheep barn, Isaac Garges, of Lutherville, Maryland, hand-trimmed a cheviot ram sheep, preparing it for the show ring.

"I've been trimming sheep all of my life," he said. The hand trim gives the ram that Gargles is working on a smooth soft coat but the trimmed wool is too short to spin into fibers, he said.

The tufts of wool end up swept up in the animal bedding, where they, too, are recycled.

Reach Molly Murray at (302) 463-3334 or mmurray@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @MollyMurraytnj.