Thieves in US eyeing used restaurant grease

New York

THE prize for the caper was more than a tonne of used restaurant grease. Two men busted by police near a strip-mall dumpster in Knoxville, Tennessee, were seen on March 2 siphoning the gooey waste into barrels on their truck. In the weeks before then, 44 similar thefts had been reported.

Stealing old vegetable oil that's been used to cook chicken nuggets and french fries sounds a little gross. But a black market for the golden gunk is growing as US refiners process record amounts of grease to comply with government mandates for renewable fuels. Last year, 635,000 tonnes were turned into biodiesel.