Food delivery firm turns grease to gas

COLUMBIA -- The vegetable oil used to cook your yummy Rush's fried chicken and french fries today will be helping to fuel the trucks that delivered them tomorrow.

The Columbia division of national food delivery giant U.S. Foodservice is pioneering a program to turn greasy used frying oil from kitchens it serves into biodiesel to help gas up its fleet of more than 150 trucks.

With regular diesel topping $4 a gallon and rising, the division has plenty of incentive to make the program successful, both in lowering its fuel costs and its carbon footprint.

The program, which could be a model for the rest of the company nationwide, already has received the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control's 2011 Earth Day Award, division president Durwood Owens said from his office in Lexington.

"That's our intent," he said. "I do think it is going to cost us less per gallon, and that's what will make things work."

U.S. Foodservice delivers more than 350,000 national brands of food from more than 60 distribution hubs nationwide.

The Columbia division alone, which covers the Midlands, the Lowcountry and much of middle Georgia, has 6,000 customers. In addition to restaurants, the division also delivers to institutions such as schools, prisons, nursing homes and hospitals.

About 800 of its customers are presently participating in the program, Owens said.

For Robin Miller, manager of Rush's on Highway 378 in Lexington, the program has turned a smelly problem into a green opportunity.

When it opened a year ago on U.S. 378 in the Target parking lot, the restaurant stored its used oil in a dumpster-like tank behind the restaurant, where it was picked up only once a month by a company that turned it into an additive for animal feed.

"It was messy. It would smell," she said.

Now, U.S. Foodservice picks up the oil, sealed in the five gallon buckets it came in, once a week in a separate truck from the delivery trucks. Outbound oil never comes in contact with inbound food. U.S. Foodservice pays the restaurants an undisclosed amount to reclaim the oil.

The Lexington Rush's goes through about 13 gallons of oil a week.

"It's so much cleaner," she said. "No mess. No smell. It's just a lot neater."

The process began in 2009 when the division was working with a Bluffton company, WVO, that was collecting waste oil and removing water, food particles and other impurities.

It would then ship the cleaned up oil, called feedstock, to a company that turned it into an 80/20 diesel/biodiesel blend called B20. Twenty percent biodiesel is maximum truck manufacturers allow due to maintenance concerns, Owens said.

Last month, US Foodservice purchased WVO and plans to move its operations -- a "tipping" station -- to Lexington.

The tipping station will be operational here late this year, Owens said, and able to convert 5 million pounds of waste oil into 400,000 gallons of feedstock each year. The division plans to use half of that for biodiesel for itself, and make the rest available to other divisions or other companies.

Michael Frank, the Rosemont, Ill.-based US Foodservice vice president of operations, said he expects other divisions to join the program as it progresses. Presently only the San Francisco division uses B20, but it does not produce it from its customers.

"We expect to duplicate the success of the Columbia biodiesel operation at other ... divisions," he said in a release. (It) offers customers nationwide an opportunity to contribute to the sustainability of our environment by reducing dependence on petroleum and cutting greenhouse gas emissions."