Online electricals retailer AO Recycling is celebrating recycling over two million fridges at its recycling plant in Telford.
An ordinary fridge-freezer next to Bertha. Credit: AO Recycling
The length of the fridges recycled clocks in at around 2,000 miles - the distance from Edinburgh to the North Pole - and has managed to stay strong despite the number of council recycling sites closing owing to coronavirus restrictions and an increase in fly-tipping over the past 18 months.
Read more: AO Recycling to open plastics recycling facility
From the period of April 2020 to April 2021, AO received over 328,000 unwanted fridges at its recycling plant from customers, up 68% compared with the same timeframe a year prior.
AO has been disposing of unwanted fridges since at least 2017, thanks to a "fridge-crushing" machine known by the company as Bertha.
Bertha is the approximate height of a three-story house and it works by spinning heavy metal chains inside an airtight container at around 500 revolutions per minute, creating a vortex that breaks the fridge into tiny pieces.
Read more: AO turns unwanted fridges into healthy fresh air
Fridges are notoriously tricky to dispose of safely, as they contain more harmful gases than your average appliance, but AO’s 80-tonne machine can tackle 100 fridges every hour. With Bertha’s help, AO can process over 700,000 fridges annually, which is 20% of all white goods scrapped every year.
The machine also takes care of the harmful gases and oils stores in fridges that can damage the environment if released into the atmosphere.
Dangerous gases are trapped between tiny pockets of insulation foam, but these are safely removed inside the sealed chamber. The company claims it is currently the only fridge recycling plant in the world to collect 100% harmful gases released from a fridge.
Once disposed of, the remaining materials are recycled into other household appliances, such as ventilation.
Read more: Going beyond industrial sustainability awareness
Robert Sant, AO Recycling's managing director said: “We’re so pleased that not only have we saved a huge two million fridges from being fly-tipped, but we’ve disposed of them in the safest way possible.
As a company, we're always looking to do more. As a retailer, we want to take responsibility for the entire recycling process and hopefully, it won’t be long before the plastics we produce can be used to create brand new fridges.”
Back to Homepage
Back to Consumer Goods