GE Appliances Helps Unveil Fridge-Recycling Behemoth in Philly, Expands Options for Customers and Supports New Jobs

September 9, 2011

It wouldn’t be out of place at a monster truck rally. 40 feet tall and capable of eating up and breaking down 150,000 used refrigerators annually, the new UNTHA Recycling Technology (URT) system at the Appliance Recycling Centers of America’s (ARCA’s) facility in Philadelphia is an engineering marvel. At an event there this morning, GE and ARCA announced that the URT system is ready to go to work on its first old fridge (as are the facility’s 50 new employees, whose new green jobs were supported by ARCA’s $10 million investment in URT and other new capital equipment).

 
 

The URT system – a 40-foot tall engineering marvel that helps reduce refrigerator landfill waste by 85 percent by weight.

 
 

There will be plenty of those refrigerators: since February, GE and ARCA have doubled the number of states served, feeding 100,000 additional appliance units to the Philly facility from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Delaware, Rhode Island and Vermont. Consumers bring their used refrigerators to participating retailers, like The Home Depot, who then send them to ARCA. It’s all part of GE’s participation in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Responsible Appliance Disposal program.

The towering URT system’s performance is impressive. By recovering around 95 percent of the insulating foam in refrigerators, in addition to high-quality plastics, aluminum, copper and steel, URT reduces the typical landfall waste of a refrigerator by 85 percent. It also lowers the greenhouse gas and ozone depleting substance emissions recovered from insulating foam.

These achievements help ensure that the end of a GE appliance’s life is just as sustainable as its birth: In April, GE became the first full-line appliance manufacturer in the U.S. to adopt an emissions-reducing foaming agent to make its top-freezer refrigerators at its plant in Decatur, Alabama. From there and everywhere else GE appliances are manufactured, they live energy-efficient lives, recognized with the GE’s winning of a sixth straight Energy Star “Sustained Excellence” award. Now, with URT operational, GE refrigerators will be reborn as completely new products. For example, steel recovered by URT will be sold to a supplier for processing and then repurchased as steel deck plate by GE Transportation for use in building locomotives.


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  • d burkett

    great idea but what do you do with the coolants?

  • Brent Junge

    I think the EPA requires the refrigerant to be recovered before a refrigeration system is scrapped.

  • Picasso

    It the pics above you can see a fridge going in that is missing the compressor, So I guess that is how 50 new jobs come into play. Those workers will be doing an EVAC on the compressor and next ripping it out. I’d like to see the room those guys do that in. Also what happens to the gas? It will be a mix of types I’d have to guess. Can that be reused?

  • Brad

    Would love to see a video of it in action!

  • R Sena

    I wonder what does it take to run this monster, hopefully the gains out weigh the consumption of power.

  • g.r.r.

    Where are the locomotives produced at? In China.
    So, now, we pay GE to produce a fridge in China, then pay GE to recycle the fridge, where they will send the parts to China for them to use in locomotives.
    Or am I wrong?

  • Jayle Enn

    If you look at the second photo in the series, you can see that they ripped the compressor and everything out of the base.

  • stomv

    How many refrigerators are disposed of per year in tUSA? It seems crazy to ship fridges from Montpelier or Charlotte to Philly — shipping by rail is cheap, but still… how many does GE expect to roll out nationwide?

  • Steven

    This post worthless without video

  • Jeremy

    very interesting machine from a mechanical design perspective! also, seems like they thought through how to use each of the types of “scrap” from the process for recycling. great work.

  • GE Reports Editor

    Thanks for your comments. Steven, I tracked down a cool animation showing the URT system in action – thanks for the suggestion!

  • Fbv

    Repairing and refurbishing of old refrigerator are worth it than crushing it in that monster machine, creating jobs for AC Techician.

  • abdul kaje

    Not only creating jobs for AC technician but also Engineers

  • EUGENE

    i worked for this company for 8 years and boy did they come a long way as a matter of fact im the one who removed the compressor from the green refrigerator in the video.

  • Alan Gross

    In fact, not only does this process recover the coolant gas from the refrigerator but also captures the harmful cooling gases in the insulating foam (“freon” is used as the blowing agent to make the foam).

    The coolant gas and foam gas have green house and global warming effect impact up to 10,000 times that of car or truck exhaust. There are 9 million refrigerators disposed of annually. About 3 million of them are repaired and re-used. Many of them are no longer efficient due to degradation of the R-factor in the foam over years of use or because the electrical components are elctricity gobblers and are outdated. As much as it would be great to create jobs in refurbishing these refrigerators, most are well beyond a serviceable range of repair…or would waste energy.

    6 million old refrigerators are recycled each year. The problem is that even though most have the refrigerant gas properly removed by a professional, trained technician the shell of the refrigerator is typically shredded at an automobile shredding/scrap yard that releases the refrigerant gas from the insulating foam directly into the atmosphere. The best intentions of appliance recyclers is sometimes negated through this method.

    Although it seems counter-intuitive to consolidate all of these refrigerators at one plant I am sure that the specialized equipment costs millions of dollars and any emmissions from transportation are well offset by the capturing of the volatile refrigerant gases.

    GE’s initiative is the most comprehensive program in the marketplace… manufacturer or retailer. If they can achieve even a 10% capture rate of the number of refrigerators discarded annually it will aid TREMENDOUSLY in the reduction in the release of the voltile gases. In the mean time let’s hope that all manufacturers and retailers move in this direction and more importantly commit to using benign gases in their insulating foams and eventually the cooling systems themselves.