You know how you’re not supposed to pour oil and bacon fat down the drain? According to the Guardian, people in London are doing it anyway — every year the city has to deal with 40,000 “fat-caused blockages” in the sewage system. But now, London has come up with a way to avoid those 40,000 messes (which we can only imagine are totally disgusting), and instead power 40,000 average-sized homes.
Before the oil and fat gets discarded, the city’s going to collect it from restaurants and food manufacturers and use it to run “the world’s biggest fat-fuelled power station.”
The Guardian reports:
Thirty tonnes a day of waste will be collected from leftover cooking oil supplies at eateries and manufacturers, fat traps in kitchens and pinchpoints in the sewers – enough to provide more than half the fuel the power plant will need to run. The rest of its fuel will come from waste vegetable oil and tallow (animal fats).
This is a really smart way to keep the sewage system running smoothly and create energy at the same time. We can’t imagine it will smell good, though.
