Our Innovations

By now, we've taken the date display off our blog because we're ashamed of how out of date it is. The truth is that the public doesn't hardly know just how busy most of us are here at WOR. It takes a lot to keep our business machine greased. (Pun intended.) Most of us have specific roles with intensive duties that leave little time for us to convey updates to the public. (Look out for profiles of our crew and what they do soon!) But today, and a few more times over this beautiful Pennsylvanian summer 2010, I'm making a concerted effort to tell you just how far we've come through a series of posts on this very blog. In our first installment, I'd like to highlight several key developments.

1. Space

When I began my relationship with WOR in November of 2008, as our first intern, I caught the company in a transitional phase from our old workshop -- some rented square footage in the back of an electrician's warehouse -- to a larger, somewhat decrepit property right next door, formerly home to the Modena Foundry Company. Though we knew fixing the place up would be a sizeable endeavor, it seemed like the most logical step towards growing and streamlining our business. And boy, was it ever! By now, the property ("fixed up" indeed) is known as the Mo-Green-A Foundry Industrial Complex, which we share with several other green businesses. In our next installment, I'll provide a more in depth look at this process of improvement and the storied history of our past business locales.

2. Heating

Though the thought of hot, steamy, used cooking oil is probably less than appealing to the average citizen, heat is essential to what we do. In order to ultimately sell our product to biofuel producers, we have to make sure it's just grease, plain and simple. What do I mean? When our drivers unload their daily catch, it comes to us diluted with water and full of particulate matter. Taking a minute to look back towards science class, we remember a simple principle: Oil is lighter than water. Unfortunately, when our waste oil is jostled around in a multitude of ways, the oil and water take longer to seperate and need a little help. Thusly, we heat our oil to ensure a water-free product. This is done in 3 large metal tanks, with heated water circulated around the outside in PEX tubing under tight insulation. Prior to this innovation, we accomplished separation by ambiently heating the entire tank room in the old shop to 85 degrees, which was somewhat wasteful -- not to mention hot for us toiling greasers!

With heat in high demand, we knew we had to think of a way to accomplish separation without polluting in the process. So why not burn some of the grease we collect? After all, just as diesel engines should run on sustainable fuels, so should oil-burners. (Guess what: "#2 Home Heating Oil" is simply dyed diesel fuel.) A previous posting on this blog highlights our original much-maligned grease-fired furnace, made by INOV8. The old Blue Meanie required much poking and prodding to get her to fire anywhere near dependably. In moving to the new shop, we decided to simply start out right and stop messing around. Enter the new boiler, a CB-500 from Pennsylvania's own Clean Burn. This sucker gives us 500,000 British Thermal Units of heat from our own filtered fuel that smells downright dandy wafting out of the chimney.

3. Filtration

It's hard to imagine a time when our volume of oil was so low that we could afford to filter incoming loads by hand with a micron bag. Enter The Dumpster. The Dumpster is really about as exciting as it sounds, but it has improved efficiency exponentially. Take your average construction-junk-hauling type dumpster and weld some screens into it and you have one mean pre-filter to catch all the super-grody flack that ends up in our clients' collections cans and dumpsters. The dumpster has a top port for our truck's hoses to pump loads in, and a bottom port through which the considerably cleaner grease is pumped towards the aforementioned heating tanks. The only maintenance this big smelly boon requires is a once-or-twice daily scraping and scooping with a shovel, done often by your humble author. Things as horrifying as deceased vermin have been found historically, but the top five items found in the dumpster are: hot dogs, french fries, chunks of congealed fat, rubber gloves, and cigarette butts. These predominantly organic materials are then composted on-site.

But that's not all!  Just last week we added two brand new 1/8" filter housings to our pipeline, creating further streamlined filtration after the separation stage.

4. Technology

You might think of those in the sanitation business as unsophisticated characters. We can't speak for anywhere else, but we at WOR are quite cultured. Did you know we have our own Web 2.0 app that we use to manage many aspects of our business? This snazzy interface, designed by Chris Mastrippolito, lets us do many things and spits out some pretty great statistics as well (like gallons picked up per month or year, and how much of that volume came from each state we service.) Among this app's lauded capabilities are: Client Management, and the ability to sort our client list into numerous different geographical categories (City, State, Zip, County, etc); Service Management and the ability to add additional stops to our drivers' routes on the fly (which they then receive on their iPhones); as well as Vehicle Management, used especially to keep track of the dispensing of Biodiesel from our newer on-site fuel tank.

Thanks for reading about a few of the things that have helped us improve our service. Stay tuned...