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A packed-to-the-gills restaurant during dinner rush doesn’t hold a candle to the hustle and bustle — both in and out of the kitchen — of a middle school cafeteria during the lunch hour.

While most restaurants have a leisurely dining room turnover, hundreds of students are cycled through the lunch line and sent out the door with full bellies every thirty minutes in a cafeteria setting. This presents a challenge not only for the front of the house cafeteria staff, but also requires a pretreatment plan that can go with the flow … literally.

School cafeterias feed hundreds — maybe even thousands — of children over a very short period of time. Sometimes, even twice a day. Every aspect of the operation, from the staff to the grease interceptor, needs to run like a well-oiled machine. One clog, one overflow or glitch could shut down the kitchen in an instant. 

But there are solutions.

The federal government takes grease seriously. Very seriously. In fact, the Department of Justice is ready, and willing, to issue federal jail time to any individual who knowingly violates the Clean Water Act, a standing tenet of which is proper grease disposal.

Just ask Mobile, Ala.’s DHS Inc. In 2011, the president and manager were charged in a 43-count indictment with violations of the Clean Water Act, as well as conspiracy and fraud. Their company, which was hired to remove the FOGs from grease interceptors, was, ironically, allegedly dumping the collected grease directly into local sewer systems — the same systems they were being paid to protect.

Grease interceptors do more than just keep fats, oils and grease out of the wastewater system. Properly maintained grease intereceptors protect your community's environment in a number of ways.

Imagine taking a paintbrush to the broadside of an old barn: Your goal is probably to cover the expanse uniformly with one color. But the result would likely be a lot different if you didn’t consider the number of boards you might have to replace, holes that need patching or nails that need to be driven back into the wood.

If you started blindly painting away without paying attention to each issue, you’d waste time, money and valuable resources.This same principle can be applied to standardized regulations in today’s economy. In an effort to comply with such uniform regulations, businesses waste valuable resources. 

A standardized approach can be more expensive, less effective, and less flexible than other approaches. There are alternatives, though.

There’s no reason why a sandwich shop or an ice cream parlor should be required to use same pretreatment system as a steakhouse … right?

Wastewater regulations today are often prescriptive, which means that one standard method of pretreatment is required for each of the food service establishments, or other commercial kitchens, in a municipality. Wouldn’t it make more sense, though, to create sanitary codes and ask businesses to develop their own methods of compliance?

Performance-based rules might not only do a better job, but could be cheaper in the long run, too.

The EPA estimates the total number miles of sewer lines snaking across the country to be about 1.2 million. Considering some of these lines are over 100 years old, local governments will spend billions of dollars modernizing failing wastewater systems over the next 10 to 20 years.

Because this aging infrastructure has survived decades of wear, tear and obstruction, decreasing its capability to withstand heavy demands, the probability of blockages and backups increases over time. And those blockages and backups are very likely to lead to the release of pollutants.

Not only do those pollutants threaten public health, they can also lead to fines and other enforcement actions from state and federal agencies. But there are things that regulators and waste water system users can do to reduce the burden on aging treatment systems, decrease costs and increase efficiencies.

In 1884, Nathaniel Whiting patented the first grease interceptor design. These oversized, concrete boxes are still the default choice for many in the food-service industry.

Though innovative at the time, the design of these concrete interceptors has changed very little over the past 130 years and is fraught with problems in today’s world. 

Traditional concrete interceptors range in size from 300 or so gallons to several thousand. Though there are a few different designs, they all rely on the same principle — gravity.

Wastewater from a commercial kitchen flows down through the tank, where food particles sink to the bottom and oil rises to the top. The grease-free water in the middle then exits the tank and enters the public sewage lines.

Though these grease interceptors do the job, they don't necessarily do it well, do it efficiently or do it economically.  

Think about the grease interceptor in your food service establishment.

You’ve seen it labor on through long days, lunch rushes followed by full-house dinners — the silent workhorse of the kitchen that helps keep your commercial kitchen environmentally friendly.

But, did you know that the design of your grease trap could have potentially devastating effects on the health of your kitchen staff?

When not properly designed and maintained, grease traps can become a breeding ground for bacteria that release hydrogen sulfide (H₂S), a pungent and sometimes deadly gas. This gas can cause health problems, which is bad enough. In addition, though, the gas can damage some grease interceptors, reducing their lifespans and creating potentially higher costs.

Fortunately, this isn't inevitable. Learn more about the dangers of hydrogen sulfide and how that should figure into your grease intereceptor decisions. 

Noncompliance with pretreatment regulations creates serious problems, both for the violator and for the wastewater system operator.

While ordinances, fines and consistent enforcement are essential, they are not sufficient for effective pretreatment. After all, the goal of a pretreatment program is to maintain water quality, reduce the load on water treatment plants and minimize sewer system maintenance costs.

The best way to achieve those goals is to prevent pretreatment ordinance violations in the first place.

Here are five key tools that every effective pretreatment program should have. Combined, these elements can reduce the enforcement burden while also maintaining a cleaner, more efficient wastewater treatment system.

It’s not very often that wastewater system workers are hailed as heroes in the headlines around the world. But in August 2013, that’s what happened.

News media around the world picked up the story of London’s ‘fatberg,’ a bus-sized, 33,000-pound mass of fats, oils and grease that had clogged an 8-foot diameter sewer line.

The English newspaper The Guardian reported:

“A sewage worker has become an unlikely hero after taking three weeks to defeat a toxic 15-tonne ball of congealed fat the size of a bus that came close to turning parts of the London borough of Kingston upon Thames into a cesspit.”

If you own a restaurant or other business within the foodservice industry, chances are good you’re already using some sort of grease interceptor. If not, sooner or later you’ll likely face clogged pipes, back-ups into your kitchen and costly fines.

In the United States, there are three types of grease interceptors generally found within the foodservice industry: small passive hydromechanical grease interceptors (sometimes referred to as grease traps), larger grease interceptors made out of plastic, fiberglass, steel or concrete, and automatic grease removal devices. Though using any of these options is better than nothing, all grease traps are not created equally and, as technology improves, so do grease interceptors.