How is the UK coping with the fridge mountain?
As I understand it, as specialist processing plants have been introduced in the UK over the past 12 months, the fridge ‘mountain’ is receding and more plants are in the pipeline. There is some suggestion that there may even be a surplus of capacity once the backlog is cleared. In Kent, in the period before we entered our formal contract, we utilised processing capacity provided by mobile plants brought in from Europe. This kept temporary storage of units to a manageable level and ensured we never had a vast ‘mountain’ to deal with. The most we ever had in storage at any one time was about 16,000 units. We are now 12 months into our contract, our backlog was cleared in the first two months and the contractor generally never has more than 4,000 units stored at any one time. In what ways can fridges be environmentally dangerous? Prior to 1994, almost all refrigeration appliances used CFCs as a refrigerant (CFC R12) and as a foam blowing agent (CFC R11) in the insulation. Both of these sub
