Posted on 01/13/2002 11:50:17 PM PST by Prodigal Son
Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Monday January 14, 2002
Britain has a dead fridge crisis. A mountain of them is growing at the rate of 6,500 a day with more than 1m due to be piled up by mid-summer.
Containers full of unwanted fridges are criss-crossing the country, being piled up in hangars and warehouses with some dumped by the roadside. Collecting, guarding and eventually disposing of these fridges is spawning a new industry.
At the root of the problem is an EU regulation, designed to protect us from being burned by the sun, in which it became illegal to dump the CFC foam which insulates fridges and freezers in landfill sites because it would escape into the atmosphere and cause further damage to the ozone layer.
But the Department for Environment did not realise in time that this regulation was coming into force on January 1. The traditional British way of getting rid of unwanted fridges was outlawed - until the end of December they were sent to giant metal crushers that could munch their way through 300 fridges an hour, but this liberated the CFCs in the foam.
Instead the fridges now have to be crushed in special closed units which at best can destroy 50 to 60 fridges an hour. These capture the CFCs in liquid form so they can be burned and destroyed.
The new regulation is designed to shield future generations from skin cancers and blindness from over exposure to ultra-violet light. The problem is that the UK has none of these special closed units.
The Department for Environment is licensing a new breed of dead fridge entrepreneurs to operate all over the country. They have placed orders for the closed fridge eating units from German manufacturers but such is the demand that the first cannot be delivered until July and most much later. With fridges being discarded by British households at the rate of 2.3m a year that means a massive storage problem.
Realising that the traditional route for disposal of old fridges was no longer available, stores and suppliers stopped taking the old models away for free in November when they delivered new ones. Getting rid of a fridge can now cost as much as £50.
The government charged local authorities with the task of solving this problem and gave them £6m to help. In turn local authorities have to store the fridges themselves or find someone who will take them off their hands. Hence the new industry.
One of the new fridge men is George Watts, one time farmer, now managing director of Good Earth Recycling, operating from Bourne in Lincolnshire. He has ordered a £2m fridge eater from Germany that will not be in operation until September. Working 24 hours a day with this machine he hopes to employ 25 people and get through up to 260,000 fridges a year. The CFCs extracted will be taken in liquid form to high temperature incinerators to be destroyed.
Meanwhile he is collecting fridges from all over eastern England and as far south as London boroughs. He has rented space in a former barracks at Wansford, Peterborough, and has space for up to 1m fridges. "When we finally get started we will have enough stock to last for months but we will need to collect up to 1,000 a day to feed the plant."
Currently he expects to charge £16 to dispose of each fridge but will charge a total of £28 to local authorities to include collecting and storage.
Another fridge specialist is Graham Davy, managing director of Sims Metal Recycling Services, who operates in south Wales, the south-west and as far east as the Midlands. He is expecting to be the first operator of a new fridge eater in the UK but that will not be until July 1 at the earliest.
He does not blame the department for the problem but rather a misunderstanding with the EU over what the regulation meant. Only Germany, Holland and Sweden installed fridge eaters in time for January 1. The other 11 countries in the EU fell into the same trap as the UK.
Mr Davy has provisionally ordered a second fridge eater to be delivered in the autumn but fears that too many businessmen will move into the market, creating a surplus capacity once the fridge mountain is eaten. This happened in Holland, causing bankruptcies, and the government had to step in. The problem has been solved now, however, because Holland is offering fridge eating services to EU neighbours which have no facilities of their own.
One of the problems reported from round the country is fridge dumping. Some truck drivers are offering to take fridges at £10 a time and then dumping them in the countryside.
The Department for Environment said that local authorities were entitled to charge the cost of collecting the fridge which was usually around £10 but could be as much as £50 in an isolated place.
Civic amenity sites still take them for nothing. They were being helped with the cost.
Intersting blow back there.
Now that's funny........
Intersting blow back there.
Yeah, but they get paid in Euros.
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