SERVING RESTAURANTS, RESPECTING AND PROTECTING OUR SEWERS
An efficient sewer system is the part of a healthy and functioning society that is easy to take for granted. Without a functioning sewer, disease can more easily spread and sources of clean drinking water - our lakes, rivers, and aquifers - are threatened.
So you manage the city’s FOG program…
You are part of a staff that is working to maintain a billion-dollar piece of infrastructure known as the community sewer system. This collection of manholes, gravity sewer mains, lift stations, force mains, receiving stations, and the primary treatment plant underpins a healthy and livable city.
Your specific job is to run the city’s Fats, Oils, and Grease program, and your team is small. In fact, it may be a team of one (you).
Your job is to enforce the Fats, Oils and Grease ordinance and make sure restaurant grease doesn’t clog the sewer. Much of the time you feel like you’re the bad guy, hassling restaurants, many of which you eat at and some that are owned by friends. This is not a fun part of the job. Restaurant owners work hard, and are understandably more focused on their menu and dining area than their grease interceptor, but you wish they would better appreciate how important a properly maintained grease-line is.
This is where Bluestem can help
When a restaurant hires Bluestem, they are hiring an absolute expert who can take care of their grease-line while freeing them to focus on their dining experience. What’s more, our experts give your FOG office the equivalent of another coworker - we know your requirements - from interceptor sizing and pump out frequency, to acceptable FOG, pH, and BOD concentrations - and how to coach each grease-line toward compliance.
“We may already know each other”
In fact, If you’ve talked with one of our coworkers on Schier’s local compliance team, you already know us! Tye, Andy, Troy, Eric, and Gonzalo work with sewer jurisdictions every day to understand their requirements, and then communicate those requirements to architects, engineers and plumbers. We also record local requirements in the Grease Monkey database - the industry’s largest and most up-to-date repository of grease interceptor code requirements.
3,807 Jurisdictions and growing
The Grease Monkey database has the grease interceptor code requirements of 3,807 jurisdictions, and that number grows each and every day. There is no other company as focused and dedicated to understanding the needs of restaurants and sewer operators than the Schier Brand family. Every restaurant we manage helps you achieve your goal of 100% restaurant compliance.
Supporting Our Aging Sewer System
The American sewer system is a marvel, but it is also struggling to keep up with population growth. While brand new sewer infrastructure will always be needed, it is not affordable to simply replace sewer infrastructure when it fails or is overwhelmed. The only viable strategy is to maintain and extend the life of existing infrastructure. Keeping restaurant FOG from reducing pipe capacity is a major contributor to extending the life of existing sewer pipe.
The Schier brand family provides a collection of products and services that work together to extend the life of existing sewer infrastructure, supporting the twin goals of fiscal and environmental sustainability.
What’s the problem with grease-laden wastewater?
There are two major components to a municipal sewer system, the piping, or “collection and conveyance system”, and the primary treatment plant, which cleans up the water before discharging it back to a local waterway (lakes and rivers).
As the U.S. population expanded and moved from the countryside and into cities, a robust sewer system was needed to convey and treat wastewater in a way that minimized disease and protected our receiving waters. The sewer systems that were built (many of them still in service today), were designed to handle bathroom waste only. However, as the country industrialized, commercial buildings were connected to city sewers, bringing high-strength wastewater into the collection system and finally into the primary treatment plants.
The primary treatment plants, with treatment processes designed to handle bathroom waste, were often unable to handle commercial wastewater, and would frequently discharge untreated wastewater into our waterways. In addition, some businesses introduced wastewater that contained solids and residues that clogged even the largest sewer mains, causing raw sewage overflows.
To address the problem of commercial wastewater, codes were developed requiring businesses to treat their wastewater (clean it up a bit), before sending it to the sewer. Some of that code language calls for restaurants to intercept and remove most of the grease and food waste resulting from their cooking and dish-washing operations.
To this day, one of the the largest single causes of sewer clogs and the resulting raw sewage overflows is grease from commercial kitchens (restaurants, hotels, etc.). The Schier brand family provides a collection of products and services that work together to extend the life of existing sewer infrastructure, supporting the twin goals of fiscal and environmental sustainability.
Our Contribution to Sewer Health
While most restaurants have grease-handling equipment installed, it is usually not maintained in a way to keep it efficiently doing its job protecting the sewer. This lack of maintenance by restaurants is not intentional, but due to lack of understanding, lack of time, and lack of expertise. This is where Bluestem helps. Our deep knowledge and expertise in managing restaurant grease-lines gets existing grease-handling equipment working efficiently, bringing restaurant wastewater into compliance and protecting our sewers and the environment.