Sewer fitness: Cutting the fat

Clogged arteries, angioplasty, big bills. Does that sound like last week’s episode of ER? Guess again. It is the ongoing story line for cities and counties nationwide as they clear their sewers of fat, oil and grease.

From California to Florida, America’s penchant for fast food and restaurant dining has contributed to a growing number of sewer blockages and overflows. Lacking the manpower to monitor grease disposal and enforce regulations, local governments are suffering the consequences as restaurants dump their cooking residue down drains and directly down manholes.

The consequences are steep. As fat, oil and grease solidifies, it chokes pipelines, eventually clogging them and causing them to cough up rivers of raw sewage. In addition to paying the cost of clearing the pipes, local governments often face regulatory fines as a result of the overflows.

For example, in January 2001, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sued Los Angeles for 2,000 sewer spills — 40 percent of which were blamed on grease — that occurred within five years. The agency also fined Cobb County, Ga., $70,000 when, a few years ago, grease blockage caused 600,000 gallons of sewage to spill into the Chattahoochee River.

According to John Harkins, an environmental engineer for EPA’s Region 4, data collected by EPA suggests that grease is the primary cause of 40 to 50 percent of sewer overflows nationwide and a secondary factor in another 10 to 25 percent. According to the Wall Street Journal, in New York alone, grease causes 5,000 sewer blockages a year.

As the surgical bills mount, local governments are fighting the fat. Using ordinances, fines and educational tools, they are reducing their risks for grease-related problems.

Intervention

For many communities, cutting the grease means tightening the slack — implementing ordinances and levying fines for illegal disposal. However, manpower is needed; large municipalities often have one or two inspectors, making heavy workloads a frequent complaint of those charged with grease patrol.

Three years ago, Cobb County passed an ordinance to control grease disposal in the area’s 3,000 restaurants to help avoid costly sewer blockages such as the one that caused the Chattahoochee spill. The ordinance requires restaurants to have grease traps meeting county specifications, and it calls for restaurant operators to pump the traps at least twice a year, delivering the grease to receiving companies.

Two inspectors monitor the restaurants, which are required to keep maintenance records on hand for review. “[The inspectors] can check not only when the grease was pumped and who pumped it, but they can also check with the receiving company and make sure the grease was in fact delivered to them,” says Robert Brice, director of the Cobb County Water System.

According to Brice, most restaurants comply with the ordinance, and those that do not comply risk being fined. While he notes that the program is “very effective” for controlling restaurant grease, he says that grease from multi-family and single-family dwellings remains a problem.

Although on-site inspection is feasible in Cobb County, it proved too costly for Orlando, Fla. Beginning in the late 1980s, Orlando inspectors sampled wastewater coming from restaurants and industrial facilities for excess biological oxygen demand and total suspended solids. “That involved going out to each restaurant or facility and taking three samples per day,” explains Dan Dashtaki, supervisor for the city’s Environmental Control Section. “With the drive time and labor costs, we found that it really wasn’t cost effective.”

In an effort to reduce costs and reduce grease in its sewers, the city switched to a Best Management Practices (BMP) program for 600 restaurants and other facilities. Facilities discharging less than 10,000 gallons of water per day can participate in the BMP program, which sets specifications for grease trap pumping. So far, 170 of 600 eligible facilities participate in the program.

Orlando specifies grease traps for each establishment, according to facility size. For example, requirements for restaurants are based on the number of seats as well as the number and type of meals served. The city also determines how frequently the traps must be pumped — usually every 90 days. By agreeing to meet those specifications, the businesses can avoid paying fines and surcharges.

For neighboring Orange County, which implemented its grease-disposal ordinance last year, fining for non-compliance is a last resort. Recently, the county began distributing posters and brochures — printed in English and Spanish — to commercial establishments, teaching proprietors the proper way to dispose of grease. Establishments that follow recommendations for construction and maintenance of grease traps can avoid fines for excess discharge.

“It’s a prevention program,” says Tim Madhanagopal, plant manager for the county’s Utilities Department. “We ask all the [establishments] to follow the program rather than being surcharged.” Participants pay the city a $25 monthly fee to cover the costs of facility inspections and administration.

Assisting with disposal

Illegal dumping of grease results from two primary factors: money and convenience. Pumping and disposing of grease is not free, and, although there are more than 27,000 companies that accept grease trap contents, many wastewater treatment plants will not accept them.

The Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati (MSDGC) is one of the few agencies that will accept grease, allowing pumpers to deposit both grease and septage waste at its main processing plant. “As a matter of public policy we’ve decided that we’re committed to the acceptance of all waste — both septage and grease,” says George Vila, supervising engineer for MSDGC. “And we do believe [the policy] is effective in terms of not having this stuff dumped out in the collection system or out into a creek and otherwise polluting the environment.”

The grease accumulates in a wet well, where it rests until workers clean it out. “Cleaning out this wet well is done every few years, and it’s really a mucky thing,” Vila says. “Once we’ve gotten rid of the [water, we mix the grease] with sawdust and haul it to a sanitary landfill. So we have tipping fees and mixing fees to deal with there.”

Keeping grease out of the water treatment process is vital to keeping costs down, Vila says. Sensors and probes that monitor plant processes can be fouled easily by grease seeping into the system. Sometimes processes have to be stopped while instruments are cleaned or repaired.

To cover its costs, MSDGC charges grease haulers $30 per 1,000 gallons of grease waste deposited at the treatment plant. The operation produces approximately $250,000 in annual revenue.

The multi-family target

Although much of the blame for grease-related blockages is laid at the door of the restaurant industry, restaurants are not the only culprits. In some cases, they are not even the worst offenders.

“Our biggest problem remains not with restaurants but with multi-family units,” Brice says. “Downstream of them, we’ve identified blockages due to grease [buildup. Residents of those] multi-family units discharge their grease into the drain.” Cobb County is weighing its options — including mass mailing educational flyers and requiring property owners to install grease traps underneath apartment buildings — to reduce discharge into sewers.

Local governments also are turning their attention to grease disposal in schools and prisons, where meals are served regularly. Yet single-family residences remain out of the line of fire. “It takes a lot of residences to equal one restaurant,” Dashtaki notes.

O&M regulations proposed

While many local governments are making efforts to prevent grease-related sewer blocks and overflows, others are waiting for a crisis to hit before they take action. That could change if EPA implements the Capacity Management Operations and Maintenance regulations, which have thus far been stalled by the Bush Administration.

The proposed regulations address sewer overflows in relation to sewer capacity and maintenance. If finalized, they would require local jurisdictions to analyze collection system capacity, identifying areas where capacity is restricted. They also would require jurisdictions to develop plans for upgrading or replacing deficient systems, and for maintaining manholes to reduce sewer inflow during rain events.

“These new regulations will require utilities to have good programs in place — including a program for grease control,” Harkins says. They also will require jurisdictions to report all sewer spills, regardless of whether the spills discharge directly into water bodies. “Frequently, if you had a grease blockage and the sewer overflowed into a yard, it wasn’t directly reported to the permitting agency because it didn’t get to water,” Harkins notes.

Harkins maintains that the initial cost of compliance with the new regulations should be approximately $100 million nationwide. That estimate includes the cost of maintaining records, reporting overflows and conducting five-year assessments of management, operation and maintenance programs.

According to Harkins, the new regulations will be an effective weapon in reducing the estimated 100,000 to 300,000 sewer overflows that occur each year. Many jurisdictions already are moving to comply with the proposed regulations, and the rest may soon have no choice. In the meantime, local governments are implementing ordinances, stepping up inspections and broadening education to combat fat, oil and grease dumping, and to preserve the health of their pipelines.

Randy Southerland is a Marietta, Ga.-based freelance writer.