Yellow Grease and Choice White Grease Prices $/CWT
The chart on this page is a historical picture of two commodities, quoted in dollars per hundredweight. A hundredweight is one hundred pounds, so a posted number is a price per hundred pounds, not per gallon and not per drum. Yellow grease and choice white grease are printed side by side because buyers compare them. They are not the same material, and the chart is not a live bid from GREASE.ORG.
Yellow grease is the trade name for used cooking oil that has been collected and settled or lightly processed. It comes from fryers. Quality is judged by free fatty acids, moisture, impurities, and unsaponifiables, often shortened to FFA and MIU. A load with high FFA or a lot of water is worth less because the buyer spends more to clean it before it becomes biofuel, animal feed, or an oleochemical. The posted yellow-grease number assumes a stated spec. A kitchen caddy full of water and batter does not automatically earn that number.
Choice white grease is an animal fat, mostly pork, defined by hardness, color, and the same family of lab tests. It is a rendering product. It is not white lithium grease, which is a lubricating grease for machines, and it is not the oil from a vegetable fryer. A chart can list both because both are fats sold by the hundredweight. Using one name for the other is how a kitchen, a renderer, and a lubricant buyer end up arguing about three different goods.
Prices move. They move with the supply of used cooking oil, the demand for renewable diesel, freight, and the cost of the next-best feedstock. A number printed on a photograph is a record of a moment. It is not an offer, a contract, or the price on the day you are reading this. A collector who pays a kitchen is pricing a specific load, at a dock, against a spec.
If you are comparing a quote to this chart, match the unit first. Cents per pound and dollars per hundredweight differ by a factor of one hundred. Match the product second. Yellow grease, choice white grease, and brown grease from a trap are three specs. Brown grease is the recovered fat from interceptor waste and usually trades at a discount because it is dirtier. It may not appear on this particular chart at all.
The cooking-oil page explains how fryer oil becomes yellow grease. The lubricating-grease pages explain white lithium grease, which does not belong in this price series. Use the chart as history. Use a written quote when you are actually buying or selling.
