A few of Wareham’s restaurant owners got an up-close-and-personal tour of a local sewer pipe clogged with grease, at a Fat, Oil and Grease informational meeting Monday afternoon. The attendees were shown a video captured by the sewer plant’s new robotic camera traveling through a sewer pipe clotted with buildup.

Guy Camphina, Wareham's Water Pollution Control Facility Director showed his film to illustrate the importance of keeping local sewer lines free and clear of as much fatty buildup as possible.

“That video we showed is only one pipe,” Camphina said. “One pipe, in the many, many miles that we have. And that wasn’t even in the most greasy area.”

The informational meeting also provided the opportunity to educate restaurant owners about their need to comply with a new grease disposal policy enacted in July 2014. In a phone call with Wareham Week Camphina said, “The purpose of the grease policy is part of the Industrial Pretreatment Program and the purpose to get the grease out of the infrastructure: the pipes of the sewer system, the wet wells, and the treatment plant itself.”

The pretreatment regulations will require restaurants to have grease traps inside the restaurants that hold 35 to 50 gallons of grease. The regulations would also require the restaurants to have interceptors outside of the buildings, which are larger tanks typically holding 1,500 gallons of grease or greater.

Camphina described these tanks' grease separation process in the phone call, “The oil dries at the top because of specific gravity. Water stays in the middle, and solids drop to the bottom.” The tanks get cleaned regularly and transported to disposal areas.

Camphina also shared information at the meeting about Greasezilla, the $400,000 grease-separation system approved at spring’s Town Meeting that will be installed at the back end of Wareham Wastewater Treatment Facility. Greasezilla is a patented, proprietary boiler technology developed by West Virginia based Downey Ridge Environmental Company. The technology consists of a skid-boiler connected to two 10,000 gallon processing tanks. The tanks are filled with brown grease and heated. The high temperature stratifies the grease producing brown and yellow grease that can be sold as a market commodity.

The Town of Wareham will be working with a broker to sell the grease to parties interested in purchasing it. Companies dealing with expired diesels, food for pets, or lubricant producers--were some examples Camphina gave of potential customers.

Campina indicated in the phone call that he is currently seeking out a broker that the Town of Wareham will work with, but because the contract has not yet been finalized, he did not wish to disclose the name of the broker at this time.

Camphina said Greaszilla is slated to be installed the week of October 12, “that's when we'll assemble it, fire it up, stake it down, and put it into operation.”

In addition to revenue resulting from the sale of the grease, Camphina also mentioned the town would be able to further reduce solids produced, thereby reducing costs of trucking it out.

Later in the information meeting, Camphina said that the town is desperately in need of cleaner sewer pipes, as demonstrated last year, when the new development at Parkwood Beach had a sewage backup that flooded Wareham River.

“Those are residents,” Camphina said, “and that system was online less than a year, and a grease blockage caused a sanitary sewer overflow into the Wareham River.”