Used cooking oil's biodiesel value draws federal theft charges against 19 people

I think the case establishes that the incentive exists. It does not yet show how large it is. The account published so far does not say how many gallons were taken from the restaurants' collection tanks or what the depots paid for them ^[4]. Prosecutors described clandestine warehouses and money laundering ^[1], which suggests the proceeds were big enough to need storing and hiding. That is an inference from how the case is framed.

The essay reporting the case was written by an environmental historian who studies how societies turn nature into commodities ^[13]. "A viscous fluid that the food industry formerly considered garbage has become valuable enough to spur a large-scale criminal operation," the historian wrote ^[6]. The essay's broader claim is about classification: "Waste describes a material's status, not necessarily its substance" ^[7]. The sociologist Zsuzsa Gille uses the term "waste regimes" for the ideas people use to decide what is valuable and what is disposable ^[8].

In the essay's earlier examples, a new technique created the buyer. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries cheesemakers got rid of whey. Dumped into waterways, it fed bacterial and algal growth that used up the oxygen in the water ^[10]. Coal plants dumped fly ash in landfills or stored it in ash ponds until engineers found in the 1930s that it could replace part of the portland cement in concrete ^[12].

The historian dates the modern scale of waste to 19th-century industry. Factories brought raw materials together in large quantities and left their residues at the same sites. That created disposal problems and gave owners reasons to find profitable uses for what was left ^[9]. A restaurant's collection tank does the same thing on a much smaller scale, holding the fryer oil in one place. Prosecutors say that is where the trucks siphoned it ^[4].