Super oil’ Sunday
Hunts Point eco-friendly company is bringing the heat for big game
THEY’RE making big oil for the Big Game.
A Hunts Point company that converts French fry oil into heating fuel will be heating up events around Met Life Stadium during Super Bowl Sunday.
Tri-State Biodiesel is transforming Met Life Stadium’s used cooking oil into heating oil that will be used for Super Bowl soirees, and to keep tents outside the stadium warm.
“It is very cool,” said Brent Baker, founder of Tri-State Biodiesel. The 10-year-old company is still nailing down logistics, but Baker estimated that thousands of gallons of recycled cooking oil would be used.
Tri-State signed a deal in late 2013 with Delaware North, the hospitality and food service vendor operating at the Met Life Stadium to convert its dirty oil.
Trucks from Tri-State have been picking drums of oil up from Met Life Stadium since last year for recycling, Baker said.
Anne Marie McManus, director of environmental affairs and sustainability at Delaware North, a hospitality management company, said it’s been converting its dirty oil since it began operations at Met Life. It partnered with Tri-State Biodiesel and began recycling its oil into biodiesel to help it become certified “green.”
“Recently, as part of our efforts to become Green Restaurant Certified, we changed our waste kitchen oil recycling vendor to TriState Biodiesel,” McManus said, “specifically because the Green Restaurant Association requested that we use a vendor that reformulates the recycled waste kitchen oil into biodiesel only (as opposed to its potential use as animal feed).”
The process involves collecting used cooking oil from eateries across New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut — with about 10 to 15% of participating restaurants from the Bronx, Baker said. The company pays the restaurants up to 50 cents per gallon for the dirty cooking oil.
The oil is then transported to the company’s Barretto St. facility, where it’s purified through a heat filtration system. The filtering extracts glycerin from the oil, rendering it chemically similar to traditional heating oil. A crew from Tri-State Biodiesel visits Patricia’s of Morris Park twice a week to retrieve two 5-gallon drums filled with oil the Italian restaurant uses in frying, manager Brian Zicholtz said.
Baker admitted that, for him, fueling the Super Bowl is bittersweet.
“I’m a pretty huge Jets fan, so if we can’t have the Jets at Met Life for the Super Bowl, at least we can have Tri-State Biodiesel,” said Baker.