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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."
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.
I'm not sure what role if any GE plays in this.
"You want to do business in our town, you gotta give us a piece of the action. See? It would be a real shame if something bad happened to your machine. Heh, heh, heh."
Have gnu, will travel.
You'll also note that their demo fridge (2nd pic in TFA) has had its compressor and coils removed as well before being sent in.
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...
I saw a mini-documentary about a car shredder/sorter on Discovery (I believe). They showed how the car was shredded, and then what techniques were used to sort all the parts. They sorted the shredded junk by specific weight (fans), magnetic properties, whether the piece would adhere to different types surfaces, how well it bounced, and numerous other ingenious methods. The end results had a remarkable fidelity as to what kinds of material could be sorted with high accuracy.
It was all very impressive. I can't relocate this video, but if anyone remembers it and can provide a link it would be great. The ones I have found are very skimpy on details, the video I remember was about 10-15 minutes long.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!