In a grubby restaurant basement in Bengaluru, two men crouch over a sticky plastic tub of something a kitchen no longer wants and the oil industry increasingly does.
The men are grease hunters: collectors who spend their days traversing the megacity’s clogged roads and narrow back alleys on motorized rickshaws, going from kitchen to kitchen to gather gallons of used cooking oil. Their cargo carries the odor of yesterday’s fried chicken and fish fritters. To a growing roster of refiners, it smells like an opportunity to convert cheap waste into valuable biofuel.
