Europe – recycling waste refrigeration equipment containing hydrocarbons: best practice defined

Of all the various ways of treating waste refrigeration equipment containing hydrocarbons (HCs), the most environmentally benign approach is to process these appliances together with CFC-containing appliances in a single specialist recycling plant. This was the irrefutable conclusion from a life cycle assessment study carried out by the Darmstadt-based Öko-Institut, one of Germany‘‘s leading environmental research organizations.



The new study is the definitive reference for anyone looking for guidance on the best possible approach to recycling end-of-life fridges and freezers. The study makes clear that simply removing hydrocarbon-containing appliances from the waste stream and processing them in a shredder without recovering the hydrocarbons is environmentally untenable as it fails all relevant environmental criteria.



Annex II of Directive 2002/96/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 27 January 2003 on waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) and most of the national implementing measures in the EU member states specify that the hydrocarbons contained in the cooling circuits and insulating foam in refrigeration appliances must be recovered before being disposed of or treated. This specification has driven the development of state-of-the-art fridge recycling technology over the last few years. Today‘‘s advanced fridge recycling plants are able to process waste refrigeration appliances irrespective of the refrigerant in the cooling circuit or the blowing agent in the polyurethane foam. The flexible configuration of today‘‘s plants allows waste appliances to be treated directly without any need for prior sorting into CFC-containing and CFC-free categories.



That using state-of-the-art recycling technology is also the most environmentally friendly means of processing waste refrigeration equipment has now been demonstrated unambiguously by the life cycle assessment (LCA) study carried out by the Öko-Institut into the recycling of CFC-containing and HC-containing refrigeration appliances. The environmental scientists at the Öko-Institut concluded that the joint processing of CFC-containing and CFC-free appliances in a specialist fridge recycling plant (what they refer to as mixed-mode processing) scores better on all key environmental indicators than any other treatment mode currently being practiced in which prior sorting of appliances is performed.



As part of the life cycle assessment, the Öko-Institut study examined the following four scenarios with respect to their environmental protection impact:





Variant 1: Mixed-mode processing – Joint processing of CFC-containing and CFC-free appliances at the same site. No prior sorting of waste appliances required.

Variant 2: Parallel processing – Separate processing of CFC-containing and CFC-free appliances at the same site. Prior sorting of waste appliances required.

Variant 3: Step 2 processing of HC-appliances in a car shredder – Separate processing of pretreated CFC-containing and CFC-free appliances at different sites. Prior sorting of waste appliances required.

Variant 4: Complete treatment of HC-appliances in a car shredder – Separate processing of non-pretreated CFC-containing and CFC-free appliances at different sites. Prior sorting of waste appliances required.



Assessing the different scenarios involved analysing important environmental factors such as resource consumption (energy resource consumption was estimated by computing the cumulative energy expenditure, CEE), the greenhouse effect, stratospheric ozone depletion, acidification of ecosystems, eutrophication of ecosystems and the formation of photo-oxidants.



In all of the environmental criteria listed above, variant 1 proved to be significantly better than the other three methods of processing waste refrigeration appliances. According to the Öko-Institut report, the obvious dominance of thi