Thames Waste Management has made arrangements for the collection and transportation of old refrigerators and freezers from the UK and will be starting transporting them to a plant at Bresch in Germany in the next few weeks.
The Ozone Depleting Substances (ODS) regulation came into force on January 1 and CFC gases now have to be recovered from fridge and freezer insulation foam before the appliances can be recycled. Before the legislation came in, a large number of waste fridges and freezers were exported to countries outside the EU but this is now banned and fridges can only be exported to countries inside the EU and only if the country has spare capacity.
Thames Waste Management is the UK waste business of RWE Umwelt AG and has reached agreement with its sister company, Bresch Entsorgung GmbH. While there is currently no capacity to remove the CFCs from refrigerator foam in the UK, plants have been up-and-running in Germany for some time. RWE Umwelt operates five refrigerator processing plants in Germany, with a treatment capacity of one million refrigerator units a year.
Left:Refrigerator units at the Bresch plant awaiting recycling.
Managing director Brian Howard said: “We are delighted to be able to offer this service to local authorities and commercial companies in the UK. Unlike other refrigerator schemes where the solution is long term storage, Thames Waste Management can collect refrigerators from larger household waste sites or from central storage facilities and take them for immediate processing. Our customers can be confident that their refrigerators are being speedily processed to the highest standard and are almost entirely recycled, including the ODS.”
The Bresch plant can remove and recycle the CFCs from both the coolant circuit and the insulating foam from 250,000 refrigerators and freezers a year. The cooling circuits are degassed and the material is collected in sealed units prior to the separation of the CFCs from the oil. The compressors are then removed for recycling and the remainder of the refrigerator is shredded. The ozone depleting substances (ODS) released from the insulating foam within the fridge carcass are cooled to –100 degrees centigrade to convert them to liquid. The liquefied ODS is then collected for high temperature treatment to produce hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids for reuse. The metals, plastics and degassed foam are all recycled, with a typical recycling rate of 96% per unit.
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