It’s one of the most common white goods in the kitchen, and one of the most difficult to replace responsibly. We open the door on a mounting environmental challenge with chilling consequences.
For most households, getting rid of an old fridge or freezer should be straightforward. You take it to your local recycling centre, arrange a collection or opt for the retailer supplying the replacement to take it away as part of the purchase.
This summer, that familiar process began to break down.
Several of the UK’s limited number of specialist fridge recycling facilities became unavailable because of fires, equipment issues and closures. The resulting loss of processing capacity meant that some Producer Compliance Schemes (PCSs) suspended collections from local authority sites.
Recycling centres rapidly filled the safe, permitted space available to them and some councils were forced to restrict or stop accepting appliances altogether.
Hot weather compounded the problem. More cooling appliances fail during periods of sustained high temperatures, and the summer of 2026 saw five official heatwaves.
This means that increased demand arrived at precisely the point when the system had the smallest capacity to accommodate it.
In July, ADEPT President Katie Stewart wrote to Rt Hon Emma Hardy MP, Minister of State for the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, calling for urgent action. We asked for clarity around the obligations for PCS and the funding of additional costs, support for a fast, pragmatic approach to temporary storage and action to create the conditions for investment to create more UK processing capacity.
Since then, there have been some encouraging developments. Additional temporary storage has been secured, including Environment Agency approval for Enva to store up to 2,000 tonnes of refrigeration equipment at Corby, equivalent to around 50,000 domestic fridges.
Some local services are beginning to recover too. Warwickshire, which suspended accepting appliances in August after around one thousand cooling products accumulated at its sites, reopened its recycling centres to fridges and freezers on the 8th of September following efforts to clear the backlog. Nonetheless capacity remains limited.
These are welcome steps, but we should not mistake coping with the immediate backlog for solving the underlying problem.
Councils in other parts of the country are still restricting or suspending services and the fundamental issue remains the resilience of the system.
Under the WEEE Regulations, producers are responsible for financing the collection and treatment of discarded electrical equipment. PCSs arrange the collection, transport and recycling of appliances from local authority sites. From ADEPT’ perspective, the concern is that when this system comes under severe pressure, councils and their residents should not be left dealing with the consequences almost entirely alone.
Local authorities have already had to identify additional storage, manage operational disruption, communicate changing arrangements to residents and deal with situations where people have nowhere legitimate to take unwanted appliances. All within already strained budgets and resources.
Our briefing made clear that producers should meet the full costs of managing this waste stream rather than councils being expected to find and fund temporary storage.
There is a wider lesson for the future too. The UK needs sufficient specialist processing capacity to cope not only with normal demand, but with plants inevitably being unavailable for maintenance, breakdowns or unexpected incidents.
Climate change makes that resilience increasingly important. If hotter summers become more frequent, as many believe they will, increased failure of refrigeration equipment will become a recurring pressure rather than an exceptional event.
We cannot rebuild the system each time capacity is disrupted.
ADEPT continues to call for an urgent review of the WEEE Regulations to ensure genuine producer responsibility, alongside government action to support investment in additional processing capacity.
The immediate fridge ‘mountain’ may be gradually reducing but the challenge is to make sure we do not simply wait for the next one to appear.
Wendy Barratt is Chair of the ADEPT Waste Group and County Waste Manager at Devon County Council.
Image: Julia Rekamie / Unsplash
More on electrical recycling:
£1m available to UK councils as Electricals Recycling Fund reopens