Full Circle UCO

by Anna Simet (Biodiesel Magazine) With a single truck in 1953, James Mahoney started up Mahoney Grease Service as a fats and oils recycler, using 13-gallon drums to service customers. Upward of seven decades later, the company has grown to service over 80,000 businesses, with 30 transfer stations and 19 recycling plants across the U.S. Over the past year, Mahoney has collected and processed about 400 million pounds (200,000 tons) of UCO. Though the company was acquired by renewable diesel and SAF producer Neste in 2020, it continues to operate as a standalone subsidiary.

President and CEO Dave Kimball says Mahoney has made 12 acquisitions in the past two years alone, jumping from roughly 240 to 700 employees. Kimball underscores how hard the company’s dedicated drivers work, often beginning 10- to 12-hour shifts between midnight and 3 a.m. to get the job done before restaurants open and to beat traffic. “Our drivers have tough jobs,” he tells Biodiesel Magazine. “They’re getting out of their truck 20 times a day and unloading UCO tanks.”

Once pretreated, the processed UCO will be shipped to one of Neste’s refineries, either in Finland, the Netherlands, Singapore or California, where the company has a joint operating refinery with Marathon Petroleum. At these refineries, collected UCO is turned into products including renewable diesel or SAF.

Combatting Theft
As are most in the UCO business, Mahoney is all too familiar with UCO theft, which Kimball describes as rampant in the industry. “It’s up to 30%, which is a huge number,” he says. “We see it all the time. When I started two years ago, we had hotspots in the Northeast and Southeast, but now, we see it everywhere.”

As for physically safeguarding against theft, Mahoney has implemented a number of measures, including supplying its customers with a UCO locker, an accessory included with their proprietary equipment, as well as devising a network of private detectives. “Whoever thought you would need that for grease?,” Kimball says. “The restaurants will let us know that it’s happening, or our drivers notify us of empty tanks, and these guys will put up cameras or do surveillance overnight. We have been really successful in the Northeast and New York area, catching these thieves.”

One issue that compounds the problem, Kimball says, is that oftentimes police don’t realize that grease theft is an issue. “They don’t know the value of it,” he explains. “Especially in the Northeast. And these aren’t smalltime criminals. There is a lot of work going into trying to stop this.”

While theoretically a tool to help prevent theft, the EPA’s aforementioned recordkeeping requirements are burdensome on and challenging for producers collecting from many thousands of restaurants, prompting a jump in cheaper UCO imports and decreased demand for domestic UCO.

Kimball adds that he believes the company is proudest of the role Mahoney is playing in the circular economy. “We’re using a recycled product, processing it, using it again, and lowering carbon footprints. It’s a pretty cool thing to get behind, and if you talk to a lot of our employees, that’s what they like the most, and it’s why they work here—they’re behind our mission. We’re doing something good for the world, and hopefully, for future generations—that’s a good feeling.” READ MORE