Scraponomics Episode 110: How are scrap appliances handled?

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” — Henry Miller, American author

It happens to everyone. Eventually, appliances break down.

These days, people seem to understand the significance of recycling items like refrigerators and freezers. The question is, how do these materials need to be handled? There’s actually more to it than meets the eye.

For scrap-processors, part of getting a license to take full vehicles as scrap is certification and training on how to evacuate the fluids from them. That training is the same for evacuating appliances with compressors, like refrigerators, freezers, and air conditioning units. As you can imagine, before these types of items can be sent to a shredder, the fluids need to be evacuated or they’ll contaminate the scrap steel.

So, how do we factor in the scrap value?

When the commodity markets were higher, we used to deduct an environmental fee from the scrap value that we paid customers for refrigerators, for example, to account for the labor involved in evacuating them. Because the markets are so low now, we simply allow people drop them off for free.

Now, say the refrigerator has already been evacuated before it gets to us. In that case, we can purchase it (and the compressor, separately) at scrap value without deducting an environmental fee.

The reason for the certification and training is that you have to contain the resulting fluids in specific containers. When ours get full, we have a registered company switch our full containers with empty ones. The fluids, themselves, are commodities and are ultimately reused.

So, there’s a lot that goes into taking appliances for scrap-processing. If you stop by Friedland, you’ll see a bunch of them. But, perhaps, now you’ll see them in a new way.

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