As I was sipping my morning cup of home-brewed filter coffee, came across this wonderful article in NYT about a robotic machine that dismantles and recycles an old refrigerator in about 60 seconds. More importantly, it pretty much recovers and recylces almost all of the CFC coolant in the compressor and foam insulation safely. It's amazing how the old business of manual dismantling and all the environmental risks they posed has evolved to this high-tech level. That's why i had to put down my steaming cuppa of Java and write about it here - Enjoy!
Here's an excerpt that describes what this machine does in the NYT article by Anne Eisenberg:
The machine, installed in Philadelphia, has a panoply of shredders, magnets, chutes and sluices worthy of a green Willy Wonka. Send a refrigerator down the conveyor belt of this unit and it is transformed into neat piles of plastic and metal that can be recycled rather than buried in a landfill. The foam insulation is turned into pellets that can be used as fuel or for other products. About a third of the coolant is recovered from the compressor and about 70 percent from the foam insulation, said Peter Hessler, managing director of Untha Recycling Technology, a company in Karlstadt, Germany, that created the new recycling system.
The entire mechanical dismantling takes about a minute, said Jack Cameron, chief executive of Appliance Recycling Centers of America and of ApplianceSmart, a chain of appliance stores. The system costs about $5.5 million and can tackle about 150,000 used refrigerators a year, he said. The capital investment for the system was possible, Mr. Cameron said, because the recycling company has a six-year contract with General Electric. G.E. delivers new appliances and hauls the old ones away in 12 Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states for Home Depot. G.E. is supplying the recycler with all of those returns.
Another robotic system that captures refrigerants down to the last few drops is at the Stow, Ohio, location of JACO Environmental. Michael Dunham, director of energy and environmental programs, said the system separates more than 95 percent of the materials used to manufacture the old appliances and sends them to be made into other products. The system, which is portable, was manufactured by SEG of Mettlach, Germany.
Many of these old refrigerators are still chugging along, Mr. Dunham said. JACO picked up about 480,000 refrigerators for recycling last year, with an average age of 21 years. “And the old ones stored away in garages and basements aren’t getting any younger,” he said. The company, which participates in a voluntary program to bag and burn old insulating foam in refrigerators, expects to receive a comparable volume of old refrigerators during the next decade.
[In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that both ARCA and Jaco provide data on recycling programs they manage for specific utilities to our E2DR DSM program data tracking, reporting and analytics dashboards system.]
Track. Report. Analyze. Manage.
