A few months back, I penned an Ask Mother Nature advice column on ways to dispose of cooking grease and as I pointed out, there are a few good ones: You can make suet cake snacks for backyard birdies or reuse it for baking and other types of Paula Deen-influenced cookery. Or, if you have a lot of the stuff, you can hand it off to your local solid waste department for proper disposal. Some restaurants will even take it off your hands. Or even better,  try calling up a biodiesel facility if there's one near you.

 

Me? I pour mine into an old Bon Maman jam jar, stick the long stem of a recycled newspaper flower into the hardened gunk, and place "the grease vase" high up above my kitchen cabinets for a touch of grease-in-a-glass-jar décor. But for the love of god whatever you do, don’t pour it down the kitchen sink.

 

In the beautiful Spanish city of Barcelona there’s another most convenient way to dispose of used churro juice cooking oil: pour it into a nifty receptacle called an Olipot (I want one!) and once it’s full, drop it off at a local recycling center, or as they’re called in Barcelona, “Green Points.”

 

As Barcelona resident/designer Petz Scholtus reports for TreeHugger, Barcelona’s Green Points centers collected 195.136 liters (over 50 gallons) of used cooking oil from households in 2010. This is a mere 2.5 percent of the total amount of cooking oil used in one year by Barcelona residents. 

 

To make the grease recycling process easier, the Barcelona City Council launched the Olipot program. As of earlier this month, Barcelona’s recycling centers ran out the first shipment of 7,000 Olipots with grease-possessing citizens going gaga over them, apparently. Now, they’re back by popular demand and the city plans to distribute 100,000 more free Olipots by the end of April.

 

 

A bit more on the Olipot itself:

 

Love it. Given that most, okay all, cities outside of Barcelona don’t provide its residents with cute cooking grease recycling containers, how do you dispose of the stuff? 

 

Via [TreeHugger]