AO celebrates recycling two million fridges

At the site, AO can process more than 700,000 fridges each year, which the company claims is 20% of all white goods scrapped in the UK annually.

Robert Sant, AO Recycling’s managing director, said: “We’re so pleased that not only have we saved a huge two million fridges from being fly-tipped, but we’ve disposed of them in the safest way possible.

“As a retailer, we want to take responsibility for the entire recycling process and hopefully it won’t be long before the plastics we produce can be used to create brand new fridges.”

AO said the pandemic had seen the number of fridges it received increase. Between April 2020 and April 2021, AO received more than 328,000 unwanted fridges from customers at its recycling plant, up by 68% compared to the previous year.

Telford

AO’s Telford plant opened after the online electrical retailer acquired Shropshire-based waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) specialist The Recycling Group (TRG) in 2017 (see letsrecycle.com story).

In 2019, AO opened a recycling facility for WEEE plastics not far from its Telford plant (see letsrecycle.com story) and celebrated recycling its millionth fridge (see letsrecycle.com story).

That same year, the Telford plant came top of a report ranking treatment standards, particularly those applying to gases, at fridge reprocessing facilities in England and Wales (see letsrecycle.com story).

Bertha

At the heart of AO’s operation is a bespoke 80-tonne shredding machine built by Austrian firm Andritz and dubbed Bertha, which can tackle 100 fridges every hour (see letsrecycle.com story).

The height of a three-storey house, Bertha works by spinning heavy metal chains inside an airtight container at around 500 revolutions per minute, creating a vortex that breaks the fridge into tiny pieces.

AO says Bertha also takes care of the harmful gases and oils stored in fridges. The online electricals retailer claims its Telford site is the only fridge recycling plant in the world to collect 100% of harmful gasses released from a fridge.

Once a fridge has been crushed, the materials are reused in other household items, AO says, such as sustainable ventilation products.