Used kitchen grease is thieves' latest target RECYCLING Biodiesel boom means grease is the thing they are stealing

Don Arnold (center) and Dave Silvestri (left) pump grease on the corner of 22nd and Irving. SF Greasecycle sends trucks around the city to pick up any grease from restaurants, hotels, and homes free of charge. Grease theft has been on the rise in the Bay Area as the prices for biodiesel have increased in the last 3 years. less Don Arnold (center) and Dave Silvestri (left) pump grease on the corner of 22nd and Irving. SF Greasecycle sends trucks around the city to pick up any grease from restaurants, hotels, and homes free of charge. ... more Photo: Sean Culligan, The Chronicle Photo: Sean Culligan, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Used kitchen grease is thieves' latest target 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

Slick-fingered Bay Area thieves are stealing restaurants' used kitchen grease, a product that six years ago was so worthless that some restaurant owners would illegally dump it down the drain instead of paying for proper disposal.

The leftover cooking oil, yellow grease, is the easiest material to turn into biodiesel. And as the alternative fuel's popularity has increased, so has its selling price, making it a target for thieves willing to go through the trouble of pumping or siphoning the grease out of storage barrels.

"It's liquid gold," said Daniel Rugg, director of engineering at the Four Seasons hotel in East Palo Alto, where security guards frequently chase away would-be grease thieves.

Last year, the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which regulates and licenses grease haulers, started denying license renewals to haulers caught stealing. In 2011, the agency denied nine renewals out of the almost 400 licensed haulers in the state, said Doug Hepper, who leads the agency's meat, poultry and egg safety division.

"We've had difficulty getting district attorneys interested in prosecuting these cases," Hepper said. "They have what they consider more heinous crimes to pursue. We can fine up to $1,000 per violation, but for some thieves that could just be the cost of doing business."

Thieves need only a truck with a pump and some bolt cutters to break into the barrels, which are often padlocked and made of steel.

"They'll go to all lengths to get the oil out of the container," said David Levenson, sales manager at Got Grease, a San Francisco grease-hauling company. "Crowbars, hammers - I've heard of some situations where people will take a blowtorch just to get through."

Taking the cream

Most restaurants' raw grease includes breadcrumbs, water and other debris, and that unfiltered product sells for around 50 to 70 percent of the price of pure grease. However, most thieves suck out the top half of barrels of grease that has settled, allowing them to pull a product that is more valuable.

In 2006, processed or "finished" yellow grease sold for 11.5 cents a pound, said Don DeSmet, vice president of the western region of Darling International, a large grease hauler and renderer. In 2011, the price was 42 cents a pound - a price jump that gave the waste product a new allure.

"People started stealing it like it was nobody's business," Levenson said.

Last month, the grease was selling for about 32 cents a pound.

Thieves with a truck, a pump and a handful of 50-gallon barrels can make a few thousand dollars a week.

While some grease thieves are amateurs pilfering barrels with ladles and hoses, others are professional haulers, officials said. Because they're licensed, it's hard to prove what has been stolen and hard to punish renderers for buying stolen goods.

Renderers can process the grease with an alcohol to make biodiesel or use it to make animal feed and other products.

When grease collectors pull up to a restaurant and find the barrels mostly empty, both they and the restaurant lose money. Restaurants that produce lots of grease will often get paid by collectors for the grease they let them take away. When that grease is gone, the restaurant doesn't get paid, and the grease collector has less to sell.

"Grease theft has hurt everybody that's legitimately in the business," DeSmet said.

Blocked sewers

For years, restaurants had to pay to have their yellow grease hauled away, and most of it was rendered into animal feed. San Francisco restaurants that didn't want to pay often dumped it down a drain, where the grease hardened like bacon fat in the sewers.

The subsequent blockages led to sewer backups under city streets and in restaurants, and utility workers had to fight constantly to keep pipes flowing, said Lewis Harrison, sewer system manager for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

In 2007, the city's Public Utilities Commission started SF Greasecycle, a program that offers a free grease container and free collection for San Francisco businesses. The collected grease is sent to a renderer that makes it into biodiesel for Muni buses.

Greasecycle now mostly handles small restaurants that don't produce much grease, said Karri Ving, the program director.

"Grease haulers in the private sector would much rather back up to a loading dock and suck out 200 gallons in 20 minutes than spend the same amount of time running up and down basement stairs collecting 20 gallons," Ving said. Since the program doesn't handle large producers - and isn't looking to turn a profit - grease theft isn't much of a problem.

Keep coming back

But for the big grease players, the thieves have been brazen and relentless.

Three months ago, security guards at the Four Seasons in East Palo Alto saw an unmarked blue truck back up to the hotel's grease barrels. Guards confronted the thief and asked him what he was doing.

"He said, 'Oh, I'm here to collect your oil,' " said Rugg, the hotel's engineering director. "But when we asked for his ID, he jumped into the truck and bolted off. Three weeks later, someone had cut the padlock on the container and taken the grease."

Since then, they've had to fend off thieves several times, Rugg said. The hotel's grease hauler replaced its container with a more theft-proof barrel, which has helped stop thieves from getting to the 500-gallon bin the hotel fills weekly.

The state doesn't have a streamlined reporting system for grease theft, but anecdotal reports suggest theft can cripple a hauling company's grease intake.

"One of our worst reports was from a driver on a route that found, out of 22 containers, only two had grease in them," Hepper said. "In the other 20, the grease was gone."