I did that once, I was staying at a family as an exchange student and immediately forced to help with chores. Now, they ran a large creche from that house so there were a lot of different chores and being on dishes could mean slaving away in the kitchen for well over an hour.
Anyway, I didn't know shit about how to properly dispose of oil and in the first or second week poured a large pan of oil down the drain. It ended up ruining some stuff and they had a hefty repair bill. I may be cynical, but I never gave a damn about it as they were basically using me as free labor anyway. Helping with household chores = ok. Helping clean up the gigantic daily mess of those shitty kids in your shitty creche = not ok
I keep a container for used cooking oil along with old motor oil. Whenever it starts getting full, I take it to the local auto parts store for recycling.
Do not take cooking oil to an Advanced Auto Parts for recycling. They do not accept that. If you'd like other options, a quick internet search will let you know what you can doodoo brown 🕺
Idc if this is dumb, I pour it in a bucket and when it's full I dig a hole in the back yard and pour the oil in there and bury it. I do this 1-2 times a year.
We had a grease can under the sink when I wasgrowing up. My fiancee and I use an old jar. I can't believe people didn't know better. They probably think it's fine to dump car fluids in the storm drain too. Idiots.
I have a small bucket filled with sawdust that I use to store used cooking oil. Bucket stays in the garage as it'll eventually go rancid. When it does, it gets thrown into the trash. The resulting mess is still greasy, but not runny. The key here is that soaking it this way limits the mess that can happen if it's knocked over; sawdust is what you use to clean an oil spill anyway.
Wood-based cat litter would also work for this. It's just compressed sawdust pellets1.
Edit: I have not looked into donating it as biodiesel. That would probably be a somewhat more green option.
1 - very likely made in the same fashion as pellet stove fuel, so that might work too.
I'll usually wipe the oil with some paper so I can throw it on the trash. Many moons ago, my family used to collect the oil to make soap at home. Last time I recall seeing that was some 30-ish years ago.
Coming at this from more of a common sense angle, I was always told oil doesn't go down the sink. For most people, it ends up in the normal rubbish.
Putting oil in the normal rubbish seems like it would have basically no issues at all. I think it would either be incinerated or end up in a landfill. If the energy from burning rubbish is being harvested (it might not be) then I would think the oil would help and that could be a useful way to recycle it.
If it ends up in a landfill, I don't see any problem with a bit of oil being buried with other junk. A lot of people seem to be saying they would bury it anyway.
The only real concern would be if you have a lot of oil and you're worried about your bin leaking or something. If you put most oil immediately into the bin then this shouldn't really be an issue.
Of course if you just have a few little drops of oil in with a bunch of water then you would probably pour that in the sink anyway and it would most likely be fine.
Collecting stuff in a bucket, making soap or using it for something else seems like a lot of hassle to mitigate quite minor concerns. Most people don't have a serious use for a bucket of used cooking oil.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.