The issue has attracted national attention today including coverage in the Mirror and Radio 4's PM programme. On the latter Cllr Twitchen assured people that there many modern fridges don’t contain CFCs in their foam. And she added: “There is no need to get rid of an old fridge for the sake of it. If you do, please make sure you get your council to get rid of it in an environmentally friendly way.”
Speaking to letsrecycle.com, she explained that from January 1 fridges are hazardous waste. “In continental Europe they have more or less got the hang of this already. They take them away and strip out the foam and all the nasties and recycle the metals and reprocess them. We used to degas them and send them to third world countries or recycle the metal. Now we have to strip out the foam as well and that’s going to cost 10,20,30 a fridge, it is anyone's guess.”
Cllr Twitchen confirmed that “there is no factory in this country capable of doing this, so we have got to store them until the reprocessing capacity is available.”
Fridge mountains
She estimated that the reprocessing capability is six to nine months away. “Because they are hazardous waste from January they will be to be stored in secure licensed storage, they can't be dumped in a field so we won't be seeing fridge mountains all around the M25. But, there will be large amounts of fridges waiting for processing and it is going to cost local authorities a lot of money. That means council tax payers. Yes we do hope we will get grants from government to meet the costs, they are talking about relatively small amounts of money and it is going to be a very big burden. We have to collect them, we have to store them and until we can do something else with them – we have to act within the law.”
Retailers are now stopping their free take-back schemes, and Cllr Twitchen said she was not surprised at this because the new legislation would make the free take back schemes an expensive operation for them. “The local authority has a duty to dispose of household waste. Collecting large items such as fridges will be different around the country, some will collect them free, some will charge, some may simply give you the opportunity to take them to civic amenity sites. At the end of the day the big cost is going to be storing them ready for disposal and when that disposal process comes on stream it will tend to be expensive.”
The councillor added that there is a very real risk of flytipping. It is a crime but somebody unfortuanely will do that and the local authority will have to pick it out of the ditch.”
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