Two Ways to Get Rid of a ‘Fridge: Throw it in a Volcano, or Recycle it in an Untha Machine
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On Friday’s premiere of An Idiot Abroad, Karl Pilkinton visited a volcano in Vanuatu—and proclaimed it the ultimate garbage disposal. “I always thought it’d be handy having a volcano close to hand just to get rid of old mattresses, old chests of drawers you don’t want,” he enthused. “I’d love that at home [in the UK], a sort of big burning hole that you just chuck stuff in.”
Thankfully, there are companies a bit more enlightened than Pilkington when it comes to getting rid of large household items. One such company is Minneapolis-based Appliance Recycling Centers of America, which maintains a 40-foot-tall machine at their Philadelphia location that recycles entire refrigerators. Full-sized ‘fridges go into one end, and sixty seconds later materials come out of the other. Evaporators, power cables, fan motors, compressors, glass shelves, and plastic drawers are converted into piles of metal, plastic and glass. The insulating foam is transformed into pellets that can be re-used as fuel. And 99.8% of the coolant in each ‘fridge is completely recovered.
The recycling machine ARCA uses is manufactured by Germany-based Untha Shredding Technology. While the inner workings of the machine are proprietary, this video from Untha showing a CGI look inside one of their municipal solid waste shredding machines gives you an idea of at least part of the process:
You can read more about ARCA, Untha, and recycling refrigerators in this Energy & Environment article in the Times.
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