Illustration by Tabi Walters
In the alleys behind Ann Arbor restaurants, workers dump the used oil into large metal containers. Most belong to three collection companies: Evergreen Grease, G.A. Wintzer & Son Co., and Buffalo Biodiesel. They sign restaurants to lengthy contracts that create a near-territorial system.
Buffalo’s clients include Tomukun Noodle Bar on Liberty and the Pretzel Bell on S. Main. The restaurants wouldn’t comment, but according to Buffalo owner Sumit Majumdar, “we pay restaurants a rebate of twenty-five cents to a gallon, which means that if I don’t collect your oil, process it, and sell it to collect my money, there’s no money involved.”
The collected oil—called “sludge”—goes into a digester to produce “methane gas that is then recycled either with the creation of renewable natural gas, or they just burn it off and run electrical generators and put power back on the grid,” says Majumdar. “The remaining, which is 70 percent of that product, we refine it down to 1 percent moisture, and then we ship it off to a refinery that will then convert, typically, into sustainable aviation fuel.”
That’s if all goes well. According to a worker at Ypsilanti’s Encuentro Latino, the restaurant was hit with complaints from city officials last year when their oil wasn’t picked up and the container overflowed. When they tried to terminate their contract, Buffalo fired back with a letter claiming that the restaurant had violated the contract by using a nearby container provided by another hauler. The letter threatened legal action, warning that Buffalo had won judgments “as high as $27,641.81.”
According to Observer contributor and Encuentro customer Sally Mitani, the other container was used by a different business. But Buffalo only backed off after the Ypsilanti city attorney got involved.
They weren’t the only ones unhappy with the company: Reddit’s r/Buffalo subreddit was opened last year with the question, “Anyone work for Buffalo BioDiesel? I see them constantly pop up on indeed, their company reviews are so bad.”
That led to a barrage of complaints, including one from a person who claimed to have answered “thousands of customer calls” while working for the company’s answering service: “There were many restaurants they would not send a driver out to for six months,” they wrote, “while city fines piled up for stacks of oil drums stuck in limbo.”