They say that green is the new black, but I didn't think that applied to the black market. Looks like illegal dealers have taken up a new environmentally friendly commodity, though: cooking oil used for bio-diesel. 

Police recently arrested two men in Arlington, Virginia for the crime of siphoning used cooking oil from behind restaurants around the DC area. Fa De Zheng and Ming Gang Lu--both from New York--aren't the only oil thieves out there, either. According to reports from local restaurants, tens of thousands of gallons of oil go missing every month. 

The cooking oil market has been getting hotter ever since new biodiesel companies and ingenious diesel-making individuals started paying top dollar for the stuff. Greenlight Biofuels, located in Charlottesville, buys used oil legally from restaurants. Their regional manager Steve Blankenship states that the street price for a gallon of cooking oil can be as high as $4 a gallon. That's more than what straight-up gas costs in most areas. And when you can sell hundreds or thousands of gallons at a time, you're looking at a rather lucrative underground business model.

Oil thievery is a brand new kind of crime, as cooking oil only recently became valuable. Police still aren't entirely sure how to qualify it, though it certainly is commodity theft. The two thieves arrested in Arlington were charged with grand larceny, but there's no standard for dealing with this kind of criminal activity just yet. While restaurants used to just throw out or give away their old cooking oil, now they can stand to profit from selling it--and they lose a good deal of cash if it's siphoned away. 

Apparently, certain intrepid thieves--perhaps underground bio-activists?--have been stealing oil for years, but the recent spike in oil prices has finally caused police to take the crime more seriously. The thefts have been a major setback for both restaurants and their biodiesel company buyers in the DC area since March. Greenlight Biofuels claim that they've lost 5 to 10 percent of their business to these thieves, or about 20,000 gallons a month of potential commodity. Apparently, it's also possible to sell the oil to firms that will convert it to animal feed, although I imagine there are fewer buyers in that field than in biodiesel.

The Arlington arrest marks the first major police action against this new breed of green crime. I wonder if we'll continue to see more serious punishment for oil thieves as biodiesel grows in value and popularity.