Big Easy Casinos Go Green: Kitchen Oil Recycling Solutions for Casinos
The challenge of cooking oil recycling in casinos
The Pelican State boasts 134 casinos while the Big Easy sports 47 and Baton Rouge just 3. The gambling scene has long been a huge tourist attraction along with Bourbon Street and the French Quarter. With all those casinos comes a host of restaurants, which in turn produce oceans of used cooking oil.
NOLA is unique and the handling of used cooking oil in all those casinos presents some pretty unique challenges for cooking oil collectors like ReBirth Biofuels.
What makes handling used cooking oil collection in casinos different?
- Distributed dining options spread over a large area
- Dining 24/7
- Cooking oil storage containers throughout a facility
- Many different hands handling cooking oil
- Need to keep employees safe
- Flexibility in collecting and storing UCO
- Need for a flexible highly skilled, reliable UCO partner
What this means is that each casino requires a customized design to efficiently, safely and cost effectively manage the disposal and recycling of UCO.
Restaurant configurations in casinos
Casinos are configured to provide games, gambling, shows and gourmet experiences. Often casinos will have a dozen different restaurants and a variety of cuisines. There is not one standard blueprint for a casino, so restaurants may be situated on different floors or on different sides of a building. There may be room service meals. The fryers may be located near a central depository for cooking oil, (outside or directly connected to a pipe) or they may be quite a distance which means oil has to be cleanly and efficiently transported to bins for collection.
A cooking oil collector must be able to handle these different configurations which means he needs a variety of methods/tools to collect and transport cooking oil. Here are some of the ways a casino can be configured to recycle used cooking oil.
Contained oil recycling
This is the gold standard for used cooking oil collection. An indoor collection tank, situated near the fryers, is directly connected to self-filtering fryers by way of a pipe. A flick of a switch and the used oil is moved through the pipes and into the tank. The tank is usually translucent so you can see the fill level. (You can also utilize wifi notifications if you want.) This configuration requires plumbing, piping and electricity (pump) to move the used cooking oil.
A variation of this configuration is to use a caddy to transport the oil from fryer to storage tank.
The caddy is placed under the fryer, the oil drained into it, and then it is wheeled to the storage bin and the oil is pumped into the tank with a wand or a hose connected to the caddy.
Sometimes the storage bin is in a centralized location such as a garage or a basement or a storage room. A caddy can be used to move the oil to the storage location.
Smaller restaurant kitchens
Smaller casino kitchens that produce less oil may not need an investment in an automated indoor tank or a caddy. In some cases an eco tub is sufficient. An eco tub is a 35 to 75 gallon sized HDPE container that oil can be stored in and the tub stored under a sink or a table. This is a low cost and efficient solution. The tub, when full, can be wheeled to a central storage area for pumping by your used oil collector.
Scheduling a used cooking oil pickup
Not only must your used cooking oil collection partner be able to access and implement these storage and transport solutions, he must be able to meet your requirements in terms of accessing the tanks for pumping and removing the oil. So flexibility and accessibility is a must.
If you have an emergency you want to be able to reach a decision maker quickly. No one wants to hear a recording or reach a large phone bank at 2:00 am.
Rebirth Biofuels has the automation, the flexibility and the reliability to partner with casinos and to handle all of their used cooking oil recycling needs. Rebirth Biofuels will also handle all of a casino’s grease trap cleaning and maintenance as well.