NEW YORK In a potential crackdown on how restaurants handle grease, New York City officials plan to investigate how authorities enforce regulations on the collection and disposal of the common foodservice waste, the New York Sun reported this week.
The city’s Environmental Protection Committee has reportedly scheduled a hearing for later this month to examine the effectiveness of the laws. The inquiry figures into a larger investigation into the causes of the flooding that shut down subways and railways in recent weeks, the paper reported. Some authorities have contended that grease buildups in sewage pipes could be a factor.
In the last year alone, the Department of Environmental Protection issued nearly 2,800 summonses to restaurants that did not have grease traps or had not properly cleaned the ones they had installed. Since the department began its grease education and enforcement initiative in 2000, approximately 18,000 new traps have been installed and more than 15,000 violations have been issued.
Some industry experts maintain that part of the problem is a lack of real estate in the city, which prevents many restaurateurs from installing larger grease traps to catch the waste. According to the Sun, some eateries in New Jersey have traps that can hold up to 5,000 gallons of grease, whereas the typical storage capacity in Manhattan is 5 to 100 gallons.
