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GE Unveils Fridge-Recycling Behemoth
An anonymous reader writes "It wouldn't be out of place at a monster truck rally. Forty 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."
Monster shredders are really nothing new. But it's still fun to watch things get tossed into them.
YouTube has quite a few video clips of big shredders shredding big things.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
We'll need something ten times bigger to eat this monster!
And more lab coats, stat!
I don't get this. This isn't GE. This is UNTHA from Austria.
Honestly, other than producing fridges that need to be recycled, I'm not sure what role if any GE plays in this.
These guys (http://www.untha.com/en) made a super shreadder that can recover spray foam as a pellet, and exceeds EPA standards for recover of gasses and other stuff, and GE says "Hey, our shit can be recycled now!".
This needs to be reduced to a size where it can be fit on a couple semis and moved around to disaster (flood, tornado, hurricane) sites where there is a large spike in the number of appliances needing disposed of. Of course then the problem becomes what you do with the fridges contents that have sometimes been stewing for weeks. I did some work in Joplin where 1 family had 3 refrigerators full of food. Moving a fridge is hard enough. Moving it when it's full of food is twice as hard. Moving a full refrigerator through a destroyed house while trying to avoid seeping goo of unknown composition is where it gets interesting.
Seems rather dramatic. Almost as they think fridges feel fear.
totally looks like Aperture Science.
In virtually *ALL* recycling operations that involve an industrial shredder, there is also automated material sorting. For example electronic recycling that starts off with a big shredder, and then routes the smaller and smaller pieces past various devices that remove different types of metals and plastics...
So really, this in fact is NOTHING NEW.
But really, good show to GE in engineering a modern shredder/sorter. It would have been nice if it also recovered the refrigeration gas. Maybe it does and I missed it...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
http://xkcd.com/462/ Reading the article, I couldn't help but hearing it in Alec Baldwin's voice.
You can tear the metal off of a fridge with your bare hands (once you get a starting point), shredding crap is not the problem with fridges, its all the gas inside of them.
So fucking what, you made a shredder, let me just shit my self
It's really a marketing program for refrigerators. ARCA runs "cash for clunkers" programs, subsidized by electric companies and government agencies. They don't even accept broken appliances, only working ones being replaced with new ones.
The machinery is built by UNTHA in Germany. There's more than shredding involved. The first step is removing the refrigerant, which is a semi-manual process. Then the shredding takes place in a nitrogen atmosphere. The usual separation techniques are employed; magnets pull out the ferrous materials, and then AC magnets pull out non-ferrous metals. Then there are cyclones and screens to separate the flufff by density. The insulation fluff is heated to drive CFCs out of the material, and those are recovered. The remaining fluff is pelletized.
Refrigerators are relatively uniform from a materials standpoint, so this is a straightforward separation process. General trash recycling is much tougher.
Who values their labor more than repairing something to return it's fitness and function? Here in America where I am from, you don't let scrappers take any broken appliances because they just disassemble them down to bare metal for the inefficiency of recycling. That kind of recycling is the stock that bankers gauge to trade their depreciating US dollars into metals that increase value when they are exported to 2nd-world manufacturing countries like China and Taiwan where their cramped labor operations refine the materials into a valuable appliance or device.
What I've known many to do is actualy collect all the broken appliances to repair them under-the-counter for resale to general contracters of their peers or trade on Craigslist. This is what Americans do with broken appliances they keep away from the scrappers. Most scrappers are illegal aliens. The legal-alien scrappers that are in America, they all collect the broken appliances to ship in convoys down through Mexico where they are repaired and resold in a lucrative market full of Service personell that keep their towns active in just this.
I have to wonder: what is America doing in allowing ANYONE to scrap or destroy an appliance or device that has a rudementary part that can be repaired to bring it back into full value. Yet there it is. Everyone trains to be an engineer, but you can't make anything durable or servicable like Tecnicians did prior to the World Wars. Why America?
Is there such a amount of refrigerators just lying around that there is a need for this machine?
I recently replaced my fridge. My trash pick-up will take fridges as long as you call them 36 hour in advance. I called, then put the fridge with door off at the curb the night before. It was there all of 15 minutes before the scrap guys the comb my area got it and took it away. There is money to be made off them in the form of recycled metals and reclaiming the refrigerant left in them. Most times when you have a working fridge, it's no problem to get rid of it to someone else who needed it. The replacement programs give about 10 to 50 buck for a running fridge. More times then not a fridge is worth more to sell to someone or even get the scrap from them then it is to turn in for the cash back. In the end those companies could stand to make 5 or 6 times that amount off of turned in fridges.
If you follow the link to the EPA's "Responsible Appliance Disposal program", (at the end of the second paragraph), it says...
Using best practices, RAD partners ensure that:
- Refrigerant is recovered and reclaimed or destroyed
- Foam is recovered and destroyed, or the blowing agent is recovered and reclaimed
- Metals, plastic, and glass are recycled
- PCBs, mercury, and used oil are recovered and properly disposed
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Basically, GE wants to create the fridge in CHina, sell it to the west, then have us pay GE to destroy our fridge, in which the raw material will be sent back to CHina to be used in new locamotives. Brilliant. GE is hard at work at destroying the west.
The Defridgenator?
The refrigerators being shredded are far less energy efficient than modern refrigerators. The idea is that the 'wasted' effort and energy in shredding a repairable fridge is less than the electricity wasted by letting that refrigerator continue to operate instead of being replaced by a modern, more energy efficient model. In fact, the total amount of electricity used by all refrigerators in tUSA has fallen by something like 75% since the 1970s, due to manufacturers complying with ever increasing government energy efficiency requirements.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
I am pretty sure it is the same machine as "Mr. Bonestripper". Now all we need is a guy that looks like Dan Aykroyd to run it.
"I tell you what there. I'll give ya all yer coke and yer grinders and spoons and pot and guns and knives and all that back to ya when ya come out the other end!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enUo-1TjdEs
Soylent Green is made from REFRIGERATORS!!!
With a good crow bar, a hammer, wire snips, a truck and less common sense than a head of lettuce. Scrap metal wont make you rich, but it pays for gas.
In my mother's garage is a GE refrigerator that has been running continuously for over 50 years, and has never been serviced!
Social Credit would solve everything...