If your family is making the turkey right, there's a ton of grease and oil oozing off it when you're done with the basting and the prep.
Now, a lot of people just pour that oily stuff down the drain and don't give it another second of thought, but Hillsborough County is really hoping you don't do that.
"If you pour your used cooking oil down the drain, it will cause clogs in pipes, which will result in sewage overflows in the neighborhood or even in your home," said Melvin Watson, an environmental specialist with the county. "And when that sewage overflows, it's a health hazard."
"If you pour that used cooking oil in your yard, then it's going to contaminate the soil, but also attract pests like ants, roaches and rats."
So if you're not supposed to drink it — which is weird and unhealthy — and if you're not supposed to pour it down the pipes, you might be wondering what to do with it.
Hillsborough County has 29 different cooking oil drop-off locations. You just pour it in a container and drop it off in one of their cabinets, where it will be recycled.
The county is trying to get the word out about these locations, and it really has made a difference.
Watson says they went from collecting around 3,000 gallons of used oil to about 14,500 gallons. That's enough to fill up 275 55-gallon drums.
"People don't realize that salad dressing or even pouring cream or anything of that nature — flour, cookie dough — down the drain is eventually going to cause the same thing to happen," Watson said. "Because it may not happen today or tomorrow, but eventually it's going to catch up with you, and it's going to cost a lot of money."
The cabinets are just for cooking oil, not anything else. And they need to be in a closed container.
"People have put motor oil in the cabinets," Watson said. "We even got a bucket of poo one time."
Watson said they also found oil in a trash bag in one of the cabinets.
Once the containers are dropped off, the oil is recycled into things like biodiesel fuel and animal feed.
"Our residents — once they find out we have a program like this — they love to participate in keeping the environment safe and also helping with the wastewater infrastructure, because they know eventually it's going to affect their residents," Watson said. "So you don't want to your children playing in sewage water because there's clogged pipes in your neighborhood or a burned out pump at the lift station.
Search your city or county recycling information for drop-off locations near you.
This story originally aired on The Bay Blend, WUSF's daily podcast. Episodes drop every weekday morning.
