Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/10/latest-fatberg-news.html
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The bacteria & pathogens in that blob interest me.
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I respect this feeling, but if we are committed to designing infrastructure around the idea of making anything undesirable just…disappear, this is going to be the result. You can hide the mess from everyone and also ask them to be aware of the mess. The solution to fatbergs probably has to be infrastructural, perhaps something as simple as a building code requirement such as the grease-trapping upgrades mentioned.
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Let’s take fat-shaming to a whole new level!
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How unfortunate the first image is merely Logie Lane, and not Loogie Lane.
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The cities are suffering from fat-clogged arteries? How macro apropos.
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Actually, they’re more analogous to veins – i.e., taking wastes away. If we ever get to fat-clogged fresh water pipes, we’re in trouble.
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Thanks. I was more art focused and less biology focused in high school; I just think of it all as blood conduits and call it day.
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I’m just too picky!
Come to think of it, I think you can get fatty deposits on veins too.
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Oh, I may have tutored / tortured you then…
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Someone needs to start a waste oil recycling business, for bio fuel, Have people just pour it into a barrel and pick up once a week, once a month.
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Never tutored, but often tortured. 
Have you ever cleaned a grease trap? I got seriously sick cleaning the grease trap at a movie theater once. It hadn’t been done in awhile, I no longer remember how long. I had to scoop it out by dipping a cup into. I had rubber gloves, but that was the extent of my protective gear. And it managed to get inside the gloves so it didn’t help much. It was the 80s, and I was too young and stupid to rebel.
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Oh. . . I thought a grease trap was some novel new way to catch mice.
My bad.
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Yup, week two of my first job – at McDonald’s. I didn’t last very long.
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Fatbergs were basically unheard of before toilet paper makers started selling “flushable” wet wipes. They’re 3 times as expensive as toilet paper, so more money for the good guys, hooray! But its not clear to me if the extra profit is greater than the expense of cleaning up these sewer blockages. I hope that some day a municipality succeeds in banning wet wipes, just to see the reaction from the asswipe industry.
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Fat in the pipes can be found and removed. It’s the invisible stuff in our “fresh” water pipes that worries me…
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Indeed - I’m on a liquid medication and I got some that was bad. On drug take-back day, the folks wouldn’t accept it – they said just pour it down the drain! I still have it and don’t know what to do with it. I could put it in a pile I’m saving for a custom “hazardous chemical” pickup (old Drano, unused ant powder, etc.), but I doubt they’d accept it. Or maybe they would.
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The y already exist, for large users of oil:
And it’s better to use one of these for recycling than to let the oil go to a grease trap- Clean oil has many more uses than grease trap residue, which just has to be burnt at best.
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I found lots of advice for dealing with old meds before take-back days became regular events. One group suggested putting pills and liquids into a storage bag with coffee grounds and throwing it in the trash. I’m still smh about an article from years ago when the local police decided to burn the old drugs that people turned in. They did this in an open field, and who knows what happened to the officers unlucky enough to be downwind.
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