In refrigerant management, appliances are just the tip of the iceberg.
There are huge banks of refrigerants to properly manage in large refrigeration systems for grocery stores and in the air conditioning systems that serve large buildings.
It is important work for people who own grocery stores and operate buildings to do good refrigerant management by using climate-friendly refrigerants, preventing leaks, and recovering refrigerants at end of life. For the rest of us, the most important thing we will ever recycle is a refrigerant-containing appliance.
When refrigerants are recovered from a typical window air conditioner before the metal is recycled, it avoids the same greenhouse gas emissions as recycling instead of landfilling 90 bags of waste! (This is how the EPA calculates the avoided emissions from recycling.)
When people learn how important it is to recycle a single appliance, awareness grows about the significance of properly managing the large banks of refrigerants that support our food chains and living spaces.
That’s why appliances are just the tip of the refrigerant management iceberg.
Does your municipality have a strong appliance recycling program?
Can you organize a Coolest Recycling Drive?
Most appliance recycling programs were set up back in the 1990s, when there was general societal consensus that we needed to address the problem of ozone depletion. Since that time, the programs have continued, but have any of them been updated and rejuvenated to optimize the opportunity to avoid greenhouse gas emissions? (We have yet to find one. If you know of a program that has, please let us know.)
If your municipality doesn’t have a program, please encourage officials to develop one. If it does have a program, encourage officials to review and update the policies and procedures to maximize avoiding greenhouse gas emissions. Here are some suggestions for rejuvenating a municipal appliance recycling program.
Update language. Review all program materials for language that references “CFCs,” “Freon” and “white goods.” A top-rate appliance recycling program should be accepting appliances with CFCs, HCFCs, HFCs, HFOs, and blends of those classes of refrigerants. “Freon,” while still widely used, is an outdated trade name; always use the word “refrigerants” wherever that term appears. While “white goods” is well known in waste circles, many people who want to properly dispose of a refrigerant-containing appliance won’t understand it or do an online search for it. Please spell out that air conditioners, dehumidifiers, refrigerators, water coolers and other refrigerant-containing appliances are accepted in your program.
Optimize refrigerant recovery. If your own staff or others are doing the refrigerant recovery work, confirm they are following best practices, such as:
Not mixing refrigerants when they are recovered.
Taking time to pull a vacuum on each appliance before moving on to the next one.
Tracking the amounts of refrigerants recovered.
Comparing amounts recovered from a batch of appliances to amounts on the spec labels (if not always, then periodically).
Sending recovered refrigerants to a certified reclamation company that is paying by the pound for the refrigerants received.
Paying the recovery technician by the hour and for the volume of refrigerant recovered provides them financial incentivizes to do a thorough job and maximize refrigerant recovery.
Metal recycling. After the refrigerants are recovered, appliances can be recycled whole and receive some recycling fees for “light iron,” which would amount to a few cents per pound. Alternatively, the appliance can be taken apart and sold into a variety of metal recycling streams, which yields a much higher dollar amount (albeit more labor is required). For example, the electric cords are sold as “dirty wire” and average about $.50/cord, while “rads” (the condensing coils and evaporation coils) are worth about $5+ apiece. (Note: there are two rads in each appliance.)
Affordability. Review any recycling fees and make the service as affordable and accessible to the community as possible. It’s true that most citizens are willing to pay a reasonable fee to have a piece of junk the size of an appliance responsibly handled and removed from their living space. At the same time, “roadside recycling” (dumping) is always free, and some citizens by default look for ways to avoid fees. Besides setting an affordable price, also consider allowing low-income residents to recycle their appliances for free, and at least annually offer free recycling (or “pay what you wish”) to everyone.
Quantify results. Collect enough data to estimate the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that your appliance recycling program avoids, and let stakeholders know the results. The best way to collect that data is to ask whoever recovers the refrigerant to provide information on the types and quantities of refrigerants actually collected. Then, using global warming potentials for those refrigerants, calculate the total carbon dioxide equivalent. Otherwise, get a count of all the appliances recycled, broken down by type, and use average carbon dioxide equivalents for those unit types to calculate the overall refrigerant bank of the recycled appliances. With that data, one can conservatively estimate 50% of the total bank was recovered. (Contact NY4Cool for assistance with either of these steps.)
Publicize results. For the City of Kingston, the appliance recycling program can potentially avoid the emissions of roughly 11% of its annual municipal greenhouse gas emissions. (See the Kingston Report for more details.) The 2026 Coolest Recycling Drive in Orange County prevented the emissions of 200+ metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (GWP20), roughly the emissions expected from 46 average American vehicles driven for one year or from the energy used by 27 households, and this was accomplished by spending less than $1,000. Statistics like these can be derived by calculating the carbon dioxide equivalent of avoided emissions, then looking up that amount of emissions on the EPA’s greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator. Let all stakeholders know about the emissions avoided by your appliance recycling program, and leverage this publicity to recycle more appliances.
Find ways to recycle more appliances. Thriving programs have ongoing aspirations to increase the number of appliances received, similar to how a business may aspire to constantly increase profits.
Example 1. Some cities allow residents to leave appliances curbside for pickup, but frequently these are not properly recycled because they are hauled off by scrap metal collectors before municipal workers show up. Find solutions to get more appliances to the recycling facility.
Example 2. Scrap metal collectors make money from finding appliances left curbside and selling the scrap metal parts, usually without recovering the refrigerant. Look for opportunities to swap with scrap metal collectors, by giving them five (or so) drained appliances for every three (or so) refrigerant-containing appliances (or some ratio that gives them more metal to sell as scrap and yields more refrigerant to recover for your program).