You may be one of those unfortunates whose fridge or freezer stopped working during the summer. Or you may have had a new kitchen installed. If so, your hopes of being free of your old appliance may have been dashed over the summer and into this month. Recycling centres nationwide have been refusing to accept fridges and freezers, with notices advising that the question of what to do with them is your own problem now. Recycling, once the main plank of the green dream, is in crisis.
At issue is a ‘backlog’ of processing after demand for disposal of cooling appliances began exceeding waste processors’ capacity. According to recycling industry compliance non-profit Ecogenesys, this backlog has two main causes. First, hot weather tends to increase the number of cooling appliances that consumers desire to replace. Second, and more significantly, a number of major recycling processors have gone out of business over the last year or so.
One of those processors was Unimetals, whose Newport site in Wales had a capacity to recycle one million appliances per year. The company went into liquidation last November. In February this year, a fire took out a newly constructed plant operated by European Metal Recycling at its Darlaston site, which had previously boasted a capacity to recycle a fridge “every 30 seconds”. And then in April, a plant in Thetford was also damaged by fire, causing Wiser Recycling’s capacity to process such waste to be lost. With all this capacity lost, England’s remaining
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“This is a fact that greens, who delight in the prospect of enforcement, are unable to put into perspective against outcomes. What do they want more: a nice, clean environment, or to play goodies and baddies?”
Actually they just want to show their virtue to applause from their in-crowd. The end result of their “warbling” is irrelevant to them.
To recycle effectively one will need to look at life cycle and employ some very innovative mineral processing, materials, biochemical and mechanical engineers from the very best departments and companies. They will need the innovative genius of Michelangelo, Barnes Wallis, James Brindley, Thomas Newcomen, Watt and Boulton, John Wilkinson,George Stephenson, Henry Royce,Charles Parson and Thomas Eddison.
Looking at people who promote and regulate green polices, this is extremely unlikely.
No, but most of them have blue hair and keffiyehs – will that do instead?
A vast bureaucracy of middle-class humanities educated graduates . These people’s employment depended upon rules, and regulations but were never held responsible for their mistakes. More rules and regulations means more civil servants. Within a decade civil service departments were controlled by people who controlled them for their benefit, not the people they supposedly served.
The massive decline in the toughness and technical skill of middle class politicians meant the civil servants went unchallenged. The days when a politician may have been a Chartered engineer or industrialist with combat experience are long gone.
What we have is similar to the Roman Catholic Church post Black Death. A vast number of bishops, abbots and priors living off inherited wealth who run the church for their benefit with few for the masses. Civil servants are supported by academics who produce reports which justify more rules and regulations.
What we need is a dissolution of the civil service and universities. Civil servants needs to be Chartered Engineers where any technical expertise is needed. Universities need to be reduced to that of pre-1939. Entry grades and exams should be of one standard, namely Cambridge /Imperial 1980. Pre 1939 , University Colleges like Hull… Read more »
And dump membership of as many international treaties and organisations as possible.
Only join those which are of benefit to us.
I couldn’t agree more. My local Council has promoted a former graduate trainee with a first degree to Principal Planning Officer and try as I might I cannot verify any further qualifications. She has the discretion to change the status of land.
I suggest all organisations awarding public qualifications should make them verifiable to anyone who asks without the consent of the person claiming to hold them. It is quite unbelievable that this is not the status quo.
A question occurs to me: are we now perhaps a fridge-lifetime removed from a previous regulatory drive? Did legislation/policy at a certain point in the past cause lots of people to all replace their white goods at the same time, all of which appliances are now coming to the end of their useful life?
Very informative and thoughtful, very helpful to have it pointed out that Greenism turned our culture from being helpful into being hostile
I am advised, by someone whose business it is to know, that at least one of the ‘fly-tipping’ sites contained 20,000 tons of what he calls ‘fines’.
This is what is left after the process of recycling and removing anything and everything remotely useful and is entirely suited to and allowed in landfill sites where, and here’s the rub, the charge for disposal is £200 a ton.
Thus, whoever it was who dumped this waste, saved themselves £4 million.
As an aside, they calculated too that in the time it took this waste mountain to appear there must have been a wagon dumping its load approximately every twelve minutes… and nobody noticed a thing, not even the farmer whose land it was on, despite every farmer I know being aware of the grass twitching at the furthest point of his demesne.
I have a way with old large kitchen appliances. They accumulate in a hidden corner of my garden and are used as weatherproof storage with built in shelves (freezers and fridges), and incinerators (oven cavities on their backs)
Fridges/freezers are heat pumps.
We are urged to install heat pumps instead of gas boilers. Heat pumps have a useful life of about ten years.
Anyone see what would happen in a few years if we did?
Then there’s all those solar panels with a ten years life span – and BEV batteries with lots of toxic chemicals.
Regarding the recycling of BEVs, didn’t Elon Musk promise at one point that all teslas would be recycled?
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Wait until they cannot recycle us after the EU directive that all deceased must be purposefully recycled. Deceased grannies fly tipped causes local stink.
Indeed the human race is doomed given the endless evidence of its collective stupidity. The maddest of times.
Anyone catch, I think it was a year ago, the ozone hole reappeared, turned out it was natural and they did a planetwide ban for nothing.
No such problem up here in Scotland, the dumps still accept fridges.
They simply get added to the absolute MOUNTAIN of them under the Friarton Bridge in Perth, for someone else to deal with at some point in the future.
It will be interesting when piles of scrap heat pumps start turning, far more refrigerant is those things than a fridge!
If we deindustrialise enough we won’t need to recycle.
Greens like the rest of the political class are not interested in governing to make life better. They have been instead ruling us for the past 30 years in a vain attempt to remake the people and the nation into a place to fit their juvenile, primitive model of how it ought to be.
Summarised in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030.
Whoever would have thought that making it impossible to dispose of certain items would result in an increase in fly-tipping? Answer. Anyone with an IQ that is measurable.
And since leaving the EU our government has had the ability to dump the Landfill Directive – devised because the Dutch are not able to dig a hole without it filling with water – which is the cause of the fly-tipping industry. And industry it is as organised crime see it as a good earner at low risk.
Essential requirement for being a bureaucrat is that of having zero ability to think critically. Met these people. Empty individuals and pure Eloi, indeed dangerous.
And we pay them! More fool us.
And some suggest increasing the pay for MPs would result in an increase in quality but seems unlikely unless you ban PPEs and anyone not having had a proper job as well as excluding the current crop of dunces.
And they’re breeding ! Terrifying.
Heres another fine example of the clean green sustainable future we have to look forward to!
https://share.google/ScEava1vnJsKHKJX6
God help the rainforests of the present and the future, they must supply all the replacement Balsa wood that is being casually buried and wasted by the millions of tons per annum!
I’ve said for a while – most things regarded as being ‘environmentally friendly’ have the exact opposite result.
This is what happens when zealots and cultists run the show.
The county is properly effed.
All these fires at recycling companies wouldn’t by any chance have anything to do with the increased use of ‘environmentally-friendly’ lithium ion batteries by any chance? Just asking for a friend.
More likely related to the economics of running such a business and the cost of insurance against fire…
Any halfway competent DIY man will be able to dismantle said fridge and get into the landfill bin over a few weeks. Not a ‘green’ solution, of course, but one which, in many variations, will inevitably result because if these daft regulations.
A while back our local council charged a fee for disposing of a bath as it’s ‘not household waste’ (eh?). A neighbour who needed to dispose of a fibreglass/acrylic one sawed it up and put it in the ordinary bin over a period of a month. He took the brassware to the dump in the usual way for metal recycling.
When I came to need to get rid of one recently I found our council now allows free disposal of a bath if you pre-register for a licence (just an hour before is good enough). A bit of a palaver.
At the dump I use there are half a dozen blokes (no women) who spend most of the day standing around.
One sits at the gate to manually check you have a reservation. No automation there.
Two hover near the metal recycling bin watching out for non-ferrous metals. I suspect they sell privately.
Another sometimes ventures into the yard to query the amount of brick you are putting in that bin but I have never seen any of them actually help move waste from a car to the bin.
A driver sometimes crushes the general waste and timber so as to get more in.
Automated entry monitoring, no pre-booking and two men ( mainly for company!) could run the entire facility.
The site is a six mile drive away. The council used to drop a skip for heavy waste every few weeks in our town, but not for some years.
Creating work for unskilled men who are probably members of a union who pay money to the Labour Party.
Isn’t it funny how with the veritable mountain of regulations that are created by our all-knowing, all-powerful technocratic rulers, the one regulation they never seem to come up with is the one which combats planned obsolescence.
Home appliances don’t need to break down as much or as quickly as they do – and there is no good reason why when they do their repair shouldn’t be simple, straightforward and economical.
Fridges (and other things) could be made to last for decades if they really wanted to. And somehow, rules and regulations for all kinds of shit, but not for that. Funny that, isn’t it…
One reason is doubtless economy. It’s cheaper to make a household appliance that lasts for 10 years than one that lasts for 25. Another may be fashion. Some people like to fill their homes with the latest gadgetry. But a third is probably industry lobbying. The manufacturers of widgets don’t want to put their factories out of business by making widgets that last too long. They can afford to lobby government and parliamentarians etc to make certain that longevity standards are not raised beyond a certain point.
Those who talk about planed obsolescence never explain how that is achieved.
It’s definitely people wanting the latest model of whatever that they assume is better than their current one because it has more features.
Cars are one of the best examples, they now come with all sorts of pointless features such as windscreen wipers that automatically start wiping when a sensor detects that it’s raining. What’s the point of this feature, is it for blind drivers who can’t see that it’s raining? It’s the same with headlights that come on automatically when it starts to get dark, is this another feature for blind drivers who can’t tell it’s dark? They’re just one more thing that can go wrong and mean cars become uneconomic to keep on the road sooner than used to be the case when they were much simpler and easier to repair.
They’re just a gimmick to try and convince gullible people that they need to get the latest updated model, the best example of this is smart phones with a new model being released every year, or pay more for features they don’t actually need. Who really needs a fridge that can make ice or displays the temperature of the inside to the nearest 0.1 degree?
Cars are certainly an excellent example. I don’t do a huge mileage these days, less than 10,000, but I find it incredible that so many chop them in at less than 100,000, especially given that for many of them the biggest motoring cost must be depreciation. Mine is nearly 25 years old and my mechanic reckons that, if properly maintained, it ought to be good for another 5 at least. What frightens me is that if and when I want to change it good used ICE cars will be as rare as hen’s teeth.
Good point. We had an English Electric (great name) fridge which did around 50 years service. If companies could build that in the 1960s, they certainly could now.
That was before it was possible to design equipment that only *just* works. Back then everything was over specified by a bloke with a slide rule.
“Anyone can design a building that stands, but it takes a talented CAD engineer to design a building that only just stands.”
Fridges that lasted for decades were very expensive in the day – few could afford them.
If you want appliances to last for decades, be prepared to pay five or six times more for them.
That’s simply not the case.
As demonstrated by both cars and airplanes, both of which are in real terms cheaper while at the same time better and more reliable.
Human enterprise is naturally deflationary. But all the benefit is literally stolen away by our ruling elites through persistent taxation and inflation.
We are so thoroughly and relentlessly abused we have become desensitised and don’t even recognise it as abuse any more.
The one that yanks my chain, is the way car manufacturers insist on making cars that require ridiculous antics to change a lightbulb, which I maintain should be possible roadside, without tools.
A recent MOT fail for the sidelights on a Ford Ranger, required the wheel arches to be removed to get to the light fitting from behind… madness!
On my C Max you have to remove the headlight to change the dip beam bulb because it is held in place by a Torx screw. You also have to remove them to release the catch that holds the foglight in place so you can change the bulb. A friend with a just later Focus – C Max is a stretched Focus – has no such problem so seems they learnt.
Of course the one you have missed is that with the fetish for all things LED the bill to change a lamp is now in the hundreds and even with bulbs they have to be compatible with the onboard computer.
And VW Golfs used to have 2 bulb tail lights – upper and lower – and a friend had one bulb fail, well refuse to light actually. It was traced back to the CPU and a snip at £500 a decade or so ago. An MOT failure because the lights did not match but friendly mechanic suggested removing the corresponding bulb on the other side so they did match.
It’s like the inverse of the old 3 yorkshiremen sketch.
Who’d ha’ thought it, 30 year’ ago that we’d be ‘ere…
A pleasant tolerably well governed country progenitor of the greatest civilization in history, become a turd world shithole in the space of a generation
Aye, we ‘ad it not bad…
“Aye, try telling that to the kids these days, and they just dont believe yer!”
The challenge would be getting the kids to divert their attention from their phones in the first place.
Aye, when I were lad we put stuff in t’ bin and it were gone within week.