photo by: Sara Shepherd

A grease bin, used to dispose of used restaurant cooking oil, is pictured in downtown Lawrence on Friday, March 29, 2019.

Just before midnight one night last month, a caller to police reported two men in a downtown Lawrence alley in the act of stealing large quantities of something most people wouldn’t want to touch.

Used restaurant grease.

Specifically, food-particle laden cooking oil, dumped into gloopy bins in the puddly, cigarette butt-strewn passageways where downtown eateries also keep their garbage dumpsters.

After switching off a vacuum coming from a large tank in the bed of their truck, the two men were arrested on suspicion of stealing over a ton of grease from four different restaurants’ bins that night, police said.

While Lawrence police say they’re not aware of previous grease theft reports here, the crime has emerged nationwide in the past decade as demand grows for biodiesel and other products that used cooking oil can become.

“It is a waste material, but it’s not completely wasteful — it can be recycled,” said Todd Mathes, senior vice president of restaurant services for Texas-based DAR PRO Solutions, a subsidiary of Darling Ingredients Inc.

Nationwide, 1.4 billion pounds of used cooking oil was turned into biodiesel in one recent year, according to a 2017 Bloomberg report. At the same time, the National Renderers Association estimates that as much as $75 million worth of used grease is stolen each year. When the market price for the commodity goes up, thefts seem to uptick as well.

Mathes’ company lays legitimate claim to the grease targeted by the Lawrence thieves.

Restaurants can’t legally dump their large amounts of grease in the trash or sewers, so they contract with companies like DAR PRO to haul it off. Their bins are clearly marked with the DAR PRO logo and a warning that the container and contents are the company’s property and anyone tampering with them will be prosecuted.

photo by: Sara Shepherd

Grease bins, where restaurants dispose used cooking oil, are pictured in downtown Lawrence on Thursday, March 28, 2019.

Such companies are able to make money off the used grease by selling it to processing plants to convert into biodiesel or other products or, in Darling Ingredients’ case, doing so at the large company’s own plants located around the country.

Restaurants can profit from their used grease, too, Mathes said. He said DAR PRO gives rebates to its restaurant customers in exchange for the grease, with dollar amounts based on the volume and the ever-fluctuating market price of the product.

Thieves, of course, don’t pay the restaurants anything for the grease they steal.

Wherever they find to sell it, they keep the profit for themselves.

Mathes and other industry professionals, in media reports, have likened the black market for used cooking oil to that of the scrap-metal business.

While plenty of people collect and sell such material on the up-and-up, Mathes said it’s something that’s easy for thieves “to go out there and take” and find somewhere to buy the stolen goods.

Grease theft is a big enough problem that it’s not unusual for companies like DAR PRO to employ their own investigative teams.

“We don’t want thieves in the marketplace,” Mathes said.

Besides stealing a valuable product from grease companies and restaurants, thieves also damage receptacles and often leave a mess, Mathes said.

DAR PRO has about 130,000 restaurant clients nationwide, Mathes said. When the company’s grease collection drivers notice “hotspots” with missing grease or damaged containers, the investigative team gets deployed.

•••

In Lawrence, it wasn’t restaurateurs who caught the grease thieves in the middle of the night and called police.

It was a team of three retired Texas police officers, working for DAR PRO, who’d trailed the suspects all the way from Springfield, Mo.

The investigators told Lawrence police that they were familiar with the driver of the truck, 28-year-old Byron P. Aston, of Springfield, Mo., because he’d been a suspect in grease thefts in that state in 2018, according to a Lawrence police affidavit the Journal-World requested through Douglas County District Court.

According to the affidavit:

Earlier that day, Feb. 26, the DAR PRO investigators had traveled to Springfield to conduct surveillance on Aston, because a vehicle similar in description to his had been used in a grease theft in another state, they told police.

Late that afternoon, they spotted Aston’s vehicle at a motel in the Springfield area and kept an eye on it. A few hours later, they followed the vehicle as it picked up another Springfield man, later identified as 26-year-old Chad A. Johnson, and drove to Lawrence.

Investigators told police they saw the truck pull behind Panera, 520 W. 23rd St., and pump grease from their company’s disposal bin there.

They then followed it downtown and over the next hour saw — and video-taped — the suspects pumping grease from bins behind three restaurants in the 700 block of Massachusetts Street.

At each spot, after the suspects moved on, one of the investigators measured the amount of grease taken from the container by comparing the “wet line” — left behind by just-removed product — to the amount of grease remaining in the container.

The investigators calculated that the thieves stole a total of 270 gallons of grease, or 2,032 pounds, from the four bins. Based on the day’s market value for the grease, 28 cents a pound, the stolen oil was worth $569, they said.

When the suspects hooked up to their next target, another restaurant grease bin in the alley behind the 800 block of Massachusetts Street, the investigators called police.

photo by: Douglas County Sheriff’s Office

Byron P. Aston

photo by: Douglas County Sheriff’s Office

Chad A. Johnson

Arriving officers found the suspects’ truck sidled up to the bin with a vacuum running.

Aston denied pumping out any grease. He told police he was checking the containers to see whether they had grease in them and if so, would follow up with the business to see if he could remove the grease for them.

“Mr. Aston stated he was just looking in the grease containers to try to find leads on increasing his business,” police wrote in the affidavit.

Johnson declined to speak with police, according to the affidavit.

After being arrested in the early morning hours of Feb. 27, both men were charged with one count of theft, involving multiple acts in the course of the same “scheme.”

Their charges are low-level felonies that, under Kansas sentencing guidelines, would carry a sentence of around 6 months probation for a person with no prior criminal history. Both men are free on personal recognizance bonds with GPS monitoring, according to court records.

Aston is self-employed in the recycling business, according to his application for an appointed lawyer. A call to a number listed for Aston wasn’t returned last week.

Johnson indicated on his application for an attorney that he’s unemployed, receiving only disability income.

Reached by the Journal-World, Johnson said he was a friend of Aston’s who agreed to come with him on a road trip to check some bins. Johnson said he didn’t know anything about grease recycling or where used grease would be sold.

“I have nothing to do with it,” he said. “I was just along for the ride, and I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

•••

“We kind of see it all,” when it comes to theft in the used cooking oil recycling business, Mathes said.

He said on one end there’s the “innocent thief,” who just wants grease to power his own green vehicle and may not realize the product isn’t just waste but actually belongs to someone else.

He said other thefts are more organized and involve multiple people working together on a larger scale.

One “large ring of thieves” in Maryland was highlighted in a 2014 article in Render Magazine, an industry publication.

In 2014, the operation’s “ringleader” was convicted of laundering more than $1.5 million in proceeds derived from thefts of grease in several counties, the article said. He was sentenced to a year and a half in prison and ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in restitution to multiple companies.

Bloomberg reported that a 2007 energy law calls for american cars, trucks and buses to use increasing amounts of biofuels, including corn-based ethanol used in gasoline and the biodiesel used grease is used to make.

That’s a major, and ongoing, driver in the demand for grease.

A 2008 New York Times article highlighted the then-newer problem of used cooking oil rustling. A man who reported grease thieves in action behind a California Burger King told the paper, “Ten years ago we couldn’t give this stuff away. Now everybody’s fighting over it.”

photo by: Sara Shepherd

Grease bins, where restaurants dispose used cooking oil, are pictured in downtown Lawrence on Thursday, March 28, 2019.