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In 2021, the fridge and combined fridge/freezer brand with the greatest number of users in Great Britain was the Turkish brand Beko.
With an estimated 8.4 million users, it was ranked ahead of other popular brands such as Hotpoint, Samsung, and Bosch.*
Energy Efficiency gains have been seen for fridge/freezer appliances, which have fallen around 50% in the last 20 years.
Washing machines and dryers have seen smaller reductions in energy use of 20%**
According to 2019 data, in the UK, domestic appliance ownership there were 37.65 million cold appliances (fridges, freezers or combined units), 34.86 million electric cooking hobs or ovens, 31.13 million washing machines, and 11.42 million tumble dryers.
The "average" life-span of large domestic appliances LDA's is 12.5 years.**
These figures exclude refrigeration appliances in the commercial and public hospitality sector, retail, education, manufacturing, health services, motorway, shipping.....
The term "white goods" refers to refrigerators, freezers, cookers, water heaters, air conditioners, washing machines, dishwashers,tumble dryers and other similar domestic and commercial large appliances and microwaves.
Components can be recycled from all white goods.
Recycling is the process of taking waste materials and converting them back into raw materials to be used in creating new products.
Metals from white goods can be recycled time and time again.
The problem with fridges and freezers are the inherent hazardous refrigerant and insulation materials, harmful to those exposed to them, and to the environment in the form of gases, heavy metals and chemicals.
These need to be recovered without loss and isolated before the rest of the refrigerator is shredded into inert materials.
Refrigerators, Freezers and air conditioners all contain Climate Forcing Agents (CFA's) which are harmful to the environment and these are the primary agents:
In 1985 a hole in the Ozone layer was discovered over Antartica and "CFCs" were identified as the primary culprit and by 1987 "The Montreal Protocol" was adopted by all of the 197 UN members to phase out both production, and consumption of numerous substances that are responsible for ozone depletion and entered into force on January 1st 1989.
As a result the hole has reduced in size and should be at 1980's level by 2040 (across much of the world) and 2066 (over Antarctica).
HCFCs (completely man made- do not exist in nature) was the successor to CFC's ( used for refrigeration, aerosol propellants, foam manufacture and air conditioning)
What wasn't known at that time was that despite HCFCs (No.2) being (comparatively) Ozone safe, they are a huge contributor to global warming and consequently HCFCs such as R22 and R502 have been prohibited from use in new equipment since 2001.
The process of recycling a fridge, freezer or an air-conditioning unit is to first of all extract all the hazardous refrigerant from the system without losing any.
If we take the figure of 37.65 million domestic appliances in the 2019 audit with a shelf life of 12.5 years and if we double that number as a very crude estimate to take into account all the fridges and freezers in all the shops, supermarkets, food manufacturers, laboratories, restaurants, bars, cafes,(not to mention ice machines) and then add in all the domestic and commercial air-conditioning units and round it up to 76 million.
We won't consider the number of air conditioned cars, vans and trucks into the equation or the fugitive emissions, the unintentional release (leaks) from the air-con units in the event of a collision.
That is a lot of harmful material and that is just the UK, a relatively temperate climate.
The recycling of refrigeration equipment adopts a dual role, one of economy and the other of a defensive / preservation activity.
Fridges go to degassing recycling plants (as opposed to metal recycling plants) that can process fridges to WEEE standards including those that have pentane in fridges which is a blowing agent used in the insulating foam as an alternative to CFCs.
Initially, glass plates, mercury switches, and capacitors are removed.
The refrigerant gases are removed.
Each refrigeration unit has a compressor which is the heart of the fridge pushing the refrigerant around, so the first stage is to remove the refrigerant gases and oils which are contaminated with the refrigerant. The vapours and liquids are stored and processed.
The compressor is then removed for processing separate to the fridge cabinet.
The cabinet is then chopped up into fractions which pass by conveyor belt under an overhead band magnet with separates out the ferrous metals.
The output fractions then consist of Ferrous metals, organic, Aluminium and PUR pellets from the foam insulation material.
Copper Coil from a Motor- the larger the motor, the more copper.
1.Hermetic casing: This is usually made of welded steel and makes up a sizeable percentage of the compressor.
2. Electric motor: Metals in the electric motor include copper (in the coil), and steel (in the laminates).
3. Piston (steel)
4. Cast iron in the compressor
5. Reticulation (copper or aluminium).
6. Motor Suspension springs are steel
7. Others (plastic, bushings, diaphragms, etc).
The components of the cooling system (compressor, condenser, evaporator, coils, fins) are made of aluminium, copper, or an alloy.
37.65 million domestic fridges and freezers in the UK and then all the commercial fridges and freezers in shops, supermarkets, restaurants, airports, schools, bars and food production facilities add up to a lot of hazardous materials that can be quickly and efficiently recovered and recycled to prevent harm.
Make sure that they are collected by a registered carrier who will collect, treat and dispose of them in facilities that are capable of handling the recovery of the materials, hazardous and otherwise.
RCS Safely and Responsibly Recycle Waste into Reusable Material RCS Recycling is registered with the Environment Agency as Carrier, Broker, Dealer (Upper Tier).
We collect commercial and hazardous waste operating in 30 counties (and counting) in the UK public and private sectors diverting waste away from landfill sites by recycling it.