What are White Goods?

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.

Recycling Refrigerators is a Challenge.

Refrigerators, Freezers and air conditioners all contain Climate Forcing Agents (CFA's) which are harmful to the environment and these are the primary agents:

1. CFCs chlorofluorocarbons (e.g. CFC's like R12) banned in the 90's
2. HCFCs hydrochlorofluorocarbons (e.g HCFC refrigerants like R22 was banned in 2001 (or 2004 for small air-conditioning systems) and from the end of 2009 the use of 'virgin" HCFC's for service or maintenance was banned and from 1st Jan 2015 all HCFC's were banned, but could be replaced with compatible HFC.
3. HFCs hydrofluorocarbons (e.g. R22 banned in 2019) 
4. Methane.

Hazardous to Health and to the Ozone Layer

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.

Removing and Isolating Fridge Components for Recycling

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.

37.65 million domestic refrigerator appliances and counting

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. 

Vehicle Air conditioning Systems

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.

Degassing Plants handle Refrigerator Recycling

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.

Refrigerator Recycling Process - How is it done?

Initially glass plates mercury switches and capacitors are removed.

The remaining fractions go through an Eddy Current separator to recover non ferrous metals such as copper and aluminium from non metallic materials such as plastic and which can separate large metal sizes down to as small as 2-3 mm.

The insulating foam (polyurethane foam, PUR foam) which contains CFCs and HCs is separated out and processed into  hydrofluoric and hydrochloric acids, thereby rendering them harmless.

The output fractions then consist of Ferrous metals, organic, Aluminium and PUR pellets from the foam insulation material.