How many pints of milk and cans of beer once sat in all this? How much cheese and yoghurt lived to fight another day thanks to this forgotten army?
Once the gleaming guardians of food hygiene in umpteen kitchens, these mouldy old fridges are now a threat both to health and the environment.
And I am looking at a staggering 80,000 of them, piled several storeys high and stretching into the distance. It’s Mount Chillymanjaro here in Newport, Gwent.
Thick steel gates, locked firmly shut, carry signs warning that the huge white sprawl inside this yard is actually hazardous waste. That is because fridges, unlike other old household appliances, still contain gases, oil and other toxic substances. Not that anyone inside the plant is doing anything about it.
This is a ghost site and has been like this all year here inside Newport docks. The last owners of the site, Unimetals, went into liquidation nearly a year ago, with the loss of 600 jobs around the country.
Now a solitary guard sits in a hut, though it’s the last place anyone would want to break in to and the fridges are not going to make a run for it. Nor is there much chance of bored youngsters climbing over the perimeter wall since all this is well beyond the checkpoints and barriers which control entry to the docks.
A staggering 80,000 abandoned fridges are piled several storeys high inside an industrial estate in Newport, Gwent
Unimetals, the previous owners of the site, went into liquidation nearly a year ago, with the loss of 600 jobs around the country
The owners of the land, Associated British Ports, tell me that they are ‘in advanced negotiations with an experienced third party to take over the site’ and that ‘in the interim, the material is being managed responsibly’.
As this sits inside an industrial estate, no residents have to overlook this mess. However, aerial footage taken by a local news agency’s drone shows the astonishing scale of the problem. And the knock-on effect is being
felt by millions across Britain because this vast dumping ground is also a very serious blockage to solving an increasingly unsightly problem: the spread of Britain’s freezer mountains.
Cooling machinery is much harder to recycle than any other household appliance because of the need to extract the gases which generate cold air, usually pentane or ammonia or ozone-depleting CFC (chlorofluorocarbon). They also contain a quantity of oil and precious metals which must be removed. Only then can each big white box be put through a crusher which will separate the rest into plastic, glass and foam for recycling.
Every year, we throw away an estimated three million cooling appliances, according to Government data. A substantial proportion of those would, in the past, have been brought to this plant in Newport. Now it is not only sitting idle but it has this huge backlog clogging up the yard.
Old fridges still contain gases, oil and other toxic substances, which are a threat to health and the environment
Robert Hardman visits the site where tens of thousands of fridges have been abandoned after a recycling firm collapsed
Ordinarily, the other nine recycling plants around the country would have absorbed the extra work – but then came further serious complications. First, the fridge recycling centre at Darlaston in the West Midlands had a fire in February followed by ongoing technical issues which have dragged on ever since. Another blaze at a plant in Thetford, Norfolk, in April reduced national capacity again as summer loomed.
Fridges are not as inert as they look. Never forget it was a faulty fridge which ignited the ghastly Grenfell Tower tragedy of 2017.
Two further factors have played a part, too. This summer’s heatwave and even, it transpires, the football World Cup have led to a spike in fridge purchases. Fridges are more likely to go wrong in summer and new appliances usually eject old ones.
The way the system ought to work is that you take your old fridge or freezer to a council tip, or you pay the local authority to collect it, or the vendor of your new one takes away the old one (which accounts for 50 per cent of all dead fridges). All these appliances then go to specialist recycling centres which, in turn, are paid via a ‘producer compliance scheme’ or PCS. In effect, the fridge-makers pay for the pulping of all these products according to the tonnage of equipment they have put into the marketplace.
The problem now, though, is this acute lack of capacity. No one can entirely agree on who is to blame, as the industry and local authorities call on the Government to step in while ministers bat the issue elsewhere.
Ultimately, responsibility lies with all of us since we all like to demand lower prices for white goods which we are increasingly keen on replacing. If, at the first sign of a blocked filter, our instinct is to buy a new model rather than call a repair man, then we are all adding to the problem.
Thick steel gates carry signs warning that the huge white sprawl of fridges inside this yard is actually hazardous waste
The result is that dozens of councils have a huge backlog of old units. In some cases, they have either stopped or significantly reduced collecting any more fridges for now.
That means that some people then pay cowboy operators to get rid of an appliance. Or, worse still, they just cut out the middle man and fly-tip it themselves.
From remote farmland to inner-city back streets, few parts of Britain have been spared a large yellowing plastic box mysteriously landing in the dead of night.
‘What we are seeing now is a system failure,’ says Jon Hubbard, chair of the neighbourhoods committee of the Local Government Association which represents 316 councils across England.
‘The system has always operated with very little contingency and, with three facilities out of action, there simply isn’t enough spare capacity to cope. We understand that levels of complaints have increased but councils don’t control that part of the system.’
Councils from Oxfordshire to Carmarthenshire to Nottingham have been asking the Government to step in, as have an army of acronyms. NAWDO (the National Association of Waste Disposal Officers), ADEPT (the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning & Transport) and AMDEA (the Association of Manufacturers of Domestic Appliances) have all ‘called on’ the Government to help build a more resilient system.
ESA (the Environmental Services Association) says that capacity will remain ‘constrained’ until more new sites are permitted. ‘Government needs to be clear about what compliance schemes must do when plants go down,’ says ADEPT, ‘and make sure local authorities aren’t left footing the extra bill.’
‘The Government needs to understand that this is not something that can be solved by asking appliance producers to pay even more,’ says AMDEA, pointing out that the margins are tight enough as it is. ‘Without Government intervention, the likely consequences are fridge stockpiles,’ says NAWDO. ‘Ultimately, councils need confidence that the recycling scheme is fit for purpose,’ says the LGA. ‘We cannot find ourselves putting out the same warnings about mountains of unwanted fridges every summer.’
The Government, in turn, is steering the blame towards the manufacturers. ‘The Waste Minister [Emma Hardy] has written to producer compliance schemes and producer representative groups asking them to take all reasonable steps to fix this fast, as this cannot go on any longer,’ says a spokesperson for DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs).
One short-term Government response has been to ease the rules on storage sites for old fridges. Because these constitute hazardous waste there is lots of red tape governing where and how you can store them. Permits for temporary dumping facilities are now being rushed through which is why, up and down the country, more land is being covered in abandoned white goods. Though temporary (in theory), these zombie fridge cemeteries are a hideous addition to the landscape.
Jon Hubbard at the LGA hesitates to put an overall figure on it all: ‘We know some of the major facilities and storage sites are already full. When you add up what councils are reporting, the total is likely to be eye-watering.’
So, too, is the cost. AMDEA’s Rebecca Hildreth tells me that official rules on storing old fridges correctly mean it can cost up to a staggering £7-per-week per unit.
Laura Gordon is cabinet member for economy and environment on Lib Dem-run Oxfordshire County Council, one of many authorities involved.
She tells me that their recycling contractors are working flat out to find extra space (while residents have a limit on the number of appliances they can dump) but argues that it needs a rethink by central government. ‘If you’ve only got ten centres nationwide, what can one council do?’ she asks, adding that the immediate priority should be for the state to step in and sort out the Newport blockage pronto.
There is some good news, however. The splendidly named ICER (the Industry Council for Electronic Equipment Recycling), which acts as a forum for all involved, points out that a huge new state-of-the-art facility is due to come on stream in Dartford, Kent, in February.
Funded by private equity, the 124,000-sq ft Enva site will soak up as much as a quarter of Britain’s abandoned fridges. Another new operation will open in Grantham a year later.
‘This is not a forever problem but it is going to take time,’ says ICER’s director, Claire Snow.
‘It’s down to an amazing combination of circumstances – from that failure in Newport to the World Cup – and it might be another year before the backlog is sorted. But it will be.’
It occurs to me that this should be a big year in the industry. For the fridge completely changed the way we all live and this year is actually its 150th birthday.
It was in 1876 that Bavarian academic Carl von Linde first discovered how to bring down the temperature inside a sealed unit using compressed ammonia (his other claim to fame was teaching an engineering student called Rudolf Diesel who went on to make quite a name for himself in the automotive world).
Sadly, nothing is planned. For all the problems with the mountains of appliances, it’s surely got to be worth a small party and a cake. Just be careful with the candles.
