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."
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.