Recycle Your Thanksgiving Cooking Oil at Gobble Grease Toss
LEXINGTON, Ky. (Nov. 25, 2020) — Frying a turkey tomorrow and don’t know what to do with your used cooking oil? Recycle it for free at the annual Gobble Grease Toss this Friday. The event runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday, Nov. 27, at Redwood Cooperative School, located at 166 Crestwood Drive in Lexington.
This year's event will follow proper physical distancing and safety guidelines. All oil and grease brought to the event should be in a disposable container, with a lid, and placed in the trunk of your vehicle. Event staff will remove it; participants are asked to stay in their cars with their windows up.
Cooking oil should never be poured down sink drains. It can solidify and clog pipes in your home. Oil and grease can even clog the city sewer lines, leading to sanitary sewer overflows — the discharge of untreated sewage into streets, yards and creeks. Grease and cooking oil can be disposed of by hardening it in the refrigerator or freezer and placing it in your green trash cart.
Going an environmental step further, the Gobble Grease Toss enables Fayette County residents to divert hundreds of gallons of cooking oil that would otherwise end up in the trash. The cooking oil that is collected will be used for biofuel research through a community partnership with the University of Kentucky Center for Applied Energy Research (CAER), with the remainder recycled through a local oil hauler.
“The Center for Applied Energy Research has worked for a number of years on the conversion of waste cooking oil to renewable fuels, funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the University of Kentucky Office of Sustainability,” said Eduardo Santillan-Jimenez, program manager with CAER and adjunct assistant professor in the UK Department of Chemistry.
“Linking the Gobble Grease Toss with these initiatives has greatly heightened their impact by allowing us to reach, serve and educate the local community in general and the Redwood School in particular.”
Redwood serves as a location for this event because its students and families are interested in improving the environment.
“Redwood is looking forward to our annual partnership with LFUCG and UK CAER to help our community make environmentally sustainable choices during the holiday season,” said Sarah Cummins, head of Redwood Cooperative School. “Our students are excited to host the Gobble Grease Toss at Redwood for the fifth time and gain valuable experiences in environmental stewardship. We appreciate the opportunity to have a positive impact on the local community."
The Gobble Grease Toss is free for all Fayette County residents (no businesses, please).
For more information on the Gobble Grease Toss, call LexCall at 3-1-1 or 859-425-2255 or visit www.LexingtonKY.gov/GobbleGreaseToss.
As the state’s flagship, land-grant institution, the University of Kentucky exists to advance the Commonwealth. We do that by preparing the next generation of leaders — placing students at the heart of everything we do — and transforming the lives of Kentuckians through education, research and creative work, service and health care. We pride ourselves on being a catalyst for breakthroughs and a force for healing, a place where ingenuity unfolds. It's all made possible by our people — visionaries, disruptors and pioneers — who make up 200 academic programs, a $476.5 million research and development enterprise and a world-class medical center, all on one campus.