Defend Your Drains: Do not pour grease, fats, and cooking oils down your drain
By North Texas Municipal Water District
Dec 30, 2017
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Properly disposing kitchen waste helps reduce sewer pipe blockages and overflows

Wylie, Texas --  As people prepare meals and snacks for holiday gatherings, some pour fats, cooking oils, and grease down the drain of their kitchen sink.  These fats, cooking oils, greases, and food wastes can result in clogged sewer pipes in your home or apartment and in city sewer pipes. 

Clogged pipes can result in a sanitary sewer overflow (SSO) when raw sewage backs up inside your home or apartment, causing potentially costly plumbing repairs. An SSO in public sewer lines can also spill raw sewage and introduce harmful bacteria into our water resources, parks, playgrounds, and streets requiring expensive repairs and environmental remediation.

“A common mistake people make while cleaning dishes is washing leftover fat, cooking oil, grease and leftover food scraps down the drain and simply turning on the garbage disposal,” said Denise Hickey, NTMWD Water Resource Program and Public Education Manager. “We should scrape leftover food scraps into the garbage and use a paper towel to wipe off the grease and oils, before putting the dishes in the sink.  Collect the cooking oil and grease, like bacon fat, in a sealable container such as a coffee can or large glass jar,” Hickey added.

Sealed containers of used cooking oil, grease and fat can be placed in your freezer until full then thrown away or brought to a recycling center where it can be turned into biofuel. 

As part of the Defend Your Drains program, NTMWD has set-up a recycling center on the north side of the district’s Environmental Services building located at 201 East Brown Street, Wylie, Texas. Sealed containers will be accepted anytime through Jan. 8, 2018.

You can find other holiday grease and oil recycling centers by visiting www.DefendYourDrainsNorthTexas.com.

About NTMWD

The North Texas Municipal Water District is a regional wholesale provider of water, wastewater and solid waste disposal services for approximately 1.6 million residents in the north Texas counties of Collin, Dallas, Denton, Fannin, Grayson, Hopkins, Hunt, Kaufman, Rains, and Rockwall – a service territory covering 2,200 square miles. For more information, visit NTMWD.com.