There's an 820-foot-long fatberg clogging an east London sewer

boing
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and another source said…

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I guess the London sewer system is really complex and old. And the fact that they don’t seem to recycle the old grease from restaurants can’t help.
I see two possible solutions : recycling line for cooking greases, or just stop eating that much fried stuff.

(I just check, there is some legislation in France about grease storage and recycling in restaurants)

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The duble-decker bus is a standard unit for length, not weight:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

The fatberg in question is 27.112 double-decker buses long and weighs in at 2.8889 Australian Trams (or 86.6667 skateboarding Rhinoceri).

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So do/did British water companies.

It’s just not enough.

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Some do. Even if you don’t, you are supposed to dispose of it properly (if you’re a food business).

http://www.londongreasetraps.com/legislation

Enforcing that is a bit of a problem.

We have an awful lot of restaurants and fast food outlets - for some reason fried chicken seems to have become the fast food du jour - and not a lot of environmental health or planning inspectors.

Since central government and local voters seem determined not to provide more money to local authorities (who are in charge of enforcing this sort of stuff), the incentives for local authorities to enforce this sort of stuff rather than trying to sort out roads, schools, housing, care for the elderly (stuff that actually wins/loses them votes) are pretty low.

Edited to add:

Also, none of that would help the untold gallons of grease and oil that domestic households and non-food businesses put down the drains.

Human life involves a lot of grease in one way and another.

Then there’s all the weird stuff people flush down the toilet.

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I dunno, maybe a Poison Idea tribute act?

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Thanks for that answer, very interesting.

I was thinking about that. Creating collecting points and distributing some king of “jerrycan for used grease” for each home could be the beginning of a solution.

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I think we’re trying to get to that point but as always with recycling persuading people to do something even slightly more onerous than chucking it in the bin/down the drain is hard.

Lots of recycling centres in the UK will take domestic vegetable oil waste. I don’t know of anywhere off hand that has domestic recycling collections for oil waste.

Turns out there are these people which is a start:

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Actually had a similar issue with a pump.

Unfortunately mine got them stuck in the impeller and died. Didn’t realize it since it was on the line just for the mother-in-law suite which is only lightly used. We noticed some odd coloring and white goo around the hatch where the tank is. I lifted the hatch and found it had filled all the way up. It’s about 7 feet deep with the pump float only supposed to let it get maybe a foot or so deep before kicking on.

Ug, nasty ain’t quite sufficient of a word. Got it pumped out and swapped out and now have a standing order of no wipes allowed.

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