The amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE or e-waste) generated annually in the EU continuously increases, establishing itself as one of the fastest-growing waste streams. 

Recognising the urgency of this issue, the EU has implemented regulations on WEEE to promote sustainable production and consumption. These rules specifically target the environmental challenges arising from the growing number of discarded electronics within the EU.

Now, prepare yourself for some astonishing statistics. The quantity of electrical and electronic equipment introduced to the EU market has surged from 7.6 million tonnes in 2012 to an unprecedented peak of 12.4 million tonnes in 2020. This eye-opening figure underlines the magnitude of the problem we're facing. In 2020 alone, a staggering 10.5 kg of electrical and electronic equipment waste was collected per inhabitant in the EU.

At Homa, we are deeply invested in this critical topic, which drives us to expand our knowledge and reduce our impact actively. We understand the significance of sustainable practices and remain committed to making a positive difference. This commitment manifests in various ways:

• We strongly emphasise the importance of being both sustainable and responsible
• We design environmentally friendly appliances that contribute to a greener future.
• We recognise the power of easy disassembly in revolutionising recycling processes.
• We continuously learn about the challenges of handling different components to ensure responsible waste management.
  
  

But there's more to uncover! 
Prepare to be amazed by the remarkable possibilities of repurposing electronics. 
Have you ever wondered what happens to your old refrigerator once it ends its life?

In an exclusive interview with Fabrizio Longoni, the general director of Centro di Coordinamento RAEE, we dive deep into the fascinating world of appliance recycling. From the intricate process of dismantling to the ingenious methods of materials reuse, this captivating journey will forever change your perspective on your kitchen companion.
Discover why designing virtuous appliances is crucial for our planet's future and how simple disassembly techniques can revolutionise recycling practices. Unveil the challenges of handling various components and explore the environmental impact of metals versus plastics. Prepare to be surprised by the truth about LED lighting and the innovative ways electronics are repurposed.

But that's not all!
Learn about the secret life of gases inside your fridge and the safe extraction methods. Explore recycled materials' remarkable transformation and potential in creating new appliances. Additionally, uncover the hidden costs and logistics behind recycling and how they shape the future of sustainable practices.
Join us on this eye-opening journey into the multiple reincarnations of the domestic refrigerator—a tale of innovation, environmental responsibility, and the exciting possibilities that lie ahead. 

Take advantage of this mind-blowing exploration of the afterlife of your trusty fridge. 

What’s the principal objective of the end-of-life processing of our appliances?
Let’s have a look at the lifecycle of our appliances: we’re talking about, in turn, the development of an original idea, the designing of the product, its manufacturing, transport, delivery, usage and subsequently, when the product becomes “waste”, its dismantling and disposal in what can be described as a second industrial phase, and one that is particularly complicated, too. This final future provider of pure-grade secondary raw-materials.

What should the ideal, virtuous appliance look like?
Ideally, we would like an appliance to be 100% recyclable, and that the costs involved in recycling it in its entirety, both financially but also in terms of labour, be as sustainable as possible. It’s very simple, if the commercial value of these secondary raw materials is less than what it costs us to extract them from a scrap refrigerator, we probably stage in a product’s life has two principal objectives: avoiding the contamination of the environment in the first place and recycling the materials it’s made of in the second place.

What’s so complicated about taking apart an old appliance?
While building a refrigerator on an industrial basis is a complex but straightforward process, de-building it, on the contrary, is quite complicated.
In the production phase, we are dealing with standardised raw materials for standardised processes, while the reverse process, or “de-production”, deals with a variety of models, production years and types of materials, with the objective to obtain usable raw-materials, the so called secondary raw-materials.
This is relatively easily done with metals – scrap yards have been around forever – but becomes a lot more complicated when it comes to all the other types of materials that are involved in the manufacturing of your fridge.
After all, it was originally designed and built to preserve food in the best possible way, and less as a won’t bother doing it, unless someone makes us.
Inversely, if the materials extracted are highly valuable and can be turned into cash quite rapidly, these scrap products will be snapped up in no time.

What recommendations would you make to designers and manufacturers?
If there’s one pledge to be made, it would have to be to make simple disassembly and easy recovery of raw materials part of the design.
Moreover, the costs associated to these operations should be considered, alongside traditional costs of production, when calculating the total cost of a product, and eventually reflect on its retail price.
“The financial and environmental opportunity cost of building a product that is not taking disassembly and recycling into account might turn out to be higher than the savings we can obtain from not investing in the engineering and design efforts to build a virtuous appliance.”

So, do designers talk to those in charge of dismantling their creations?
The difficulty is that people who today are working on disassembly and recycling, are dealing with the product of someone’s work from 15 or 20 years ago.
There’s a delay in time, so dialogue is virtually impossible.
The real question is “how good is today’s designer at foreseeing what will happen in 20 years’ time?”. The way we build appliances, the materials we employ, do evolve. Over time, often by small incremental steps, but at times through significant innovation.
All this should be considered when designing new products.

Would using more metal and less plastics be helpful in some way?
Certainly. The types of plastic that we used some years ago cannot simply be employed today.
Nowadays, we can better assess the environmental impact of these types of polymers.
We wouldn’t be allowed to use them for the same purposes. While metals can be recycled infinite times and used in exactly the same way, plastics are far more problematic and become obsolete quite rapidly.

How does easy disassembly of the various components affect the recyclability of a product?
The ultimate goal of the industrial recycling phase is to obtain usable, homogeneous raw materials, so the easier it is to separate them the better.
For what concerns cooling appliances, there are some operations that need to be performed in the first place, starting with making the products “safe”.
The compressor and the serpentine must be emptied of all the oil and gases and separated from the rest of the appliance, which is anyway made of a multiplicity of components.
The electronics alone are quite intricate and made up of a myriad of elements.
The insulation represents a further problem, as it adheres quite strongly to the panels, and contains different types of gases, including pentane, which is highly flammable.
Expanding polyurethane with gases such as pentane is easy and cheap when producing the appliance, but it becomes an issue when it comes to its dismantling. Even modern-day state-of-the-art insulation represented by VIP Vacuum Insulated Panels do pose some problems for their core is made of either glass fibre or silica. Working in a standardised environment with standardised products and procedures is relatively easy and safe, while having to do with a variety of products of all shapes, ages, and production methods are a completely different ball game.

What about LED lighting, does that make a difference?
It certainly does, but less in terms of energy savings than on the health and safety front which heavily impacts the cost of disposal.
Traditional light bulbs contain tungsten, which prevents them from being easily recycled as glass, since it will seriously damage glass foundry furnaces.
Even energy-saving fluorescent lights pose a problem since they produce light through a chemical reaction involving mercury vapour.
These can represent a serious contamination and health hazard in the disassembly phase.
LED lights, in that sense, are much easier to treat, without any risk, and therefore are cheaper to recycle.

What happens to the electronics?
Nowadays there’s an increasing quantity of electronic components in our appliances.
A typical motherboard is made up of a very large number of elements, each in very small quantities.
These components are simply set aside and dealt with by specialised facilities.
There are a few in Europe, but Japan is highly specialised in this field and is literally importing scrap electronic components to extract the rare and valuable elements they contain and reinject them in the production cycle.

Cooling appliances also contain gases…
That’s correct, and similarly to plastic, we have developed and used many types of gases over time.
Recycling facilities need to be prepared and equipped to deal with each possible kind of product, some are not legal to use in today’s appliances, with the objective to avoid contamination of the environment. 
Now, the geographical areas with the highest quantities of “old” gases in their discarded appliances are Northern European countries or regions with cold climates.
Southern Europe or warmer regions have already disposed of almost an entire generation of products containing such gases since cooling appliances tend to have a shorter lifespan in hot climates.
Let’s also remember that gases are not only contained in the compressor-serpentine system, but also in the insulating materials, from which they need to be “squeezed out”.

How much of the recycled materials end up in new appliances?
Apart from steel and copper, which can subsequently also be employed in any industry as a pure-grade material, not much, really, since the industry tends to work on highly standardised processes that depend on standardised raw-materials.
But that’s not the point, since the purpose of recycling is that these materials do have a new life of some sort.
If glass coming from the shelves of a refrigerator cannot be employed in the same role again, perhaps because of unsightly impurities, it may end up as glass fibre in some kind of insulation.
Similarly, the shiny transparent plastic of balconies, the immaculate inner lining of the cavity, may find a new life in pile garments or even as an appliance’s chassis.

How much does it cost to recycle a fridge?
It’s hard to tell precisely since we are dealing with an immense variety of models, sizes, shapes, materials and technologies.
The current average figure agreed upon in the industry is around 4% of the cost of production if we don’t consider collection costs from consumer homes to centralised collection points.
Even so, logistics still represents the largest part of such cost.
With respect to the production, distribution and delivery phases in a product’s lifecycle, dismantling and recycling demand a “reverse logistics” approach, whereas, instead of shipping a multitude of products from one single facility to a number of distributors, then to retailers and eventually to consumers, here we are doing the exact contrary: we are collecting products from a multitude of locations and shipping them to a single facility.
These products are not even the same size or weight, so you have no way of optimising your transport, hence the heavy impact on costs.
As we kiss goodbye to our trusted double-door on its way to a new life, we might be saddened by the fact that we probably won’t see it again in our kitchens, but comforted by learning that, in a not-so-distant future, we might be wearing it instead, or keep warm thanks to it, or even drive it!
What’s important is that it won’t end up in a landfill, our oceans or even worse, our atmosphere.
In that, designers have a very important role to play in making sure our appliances are ever more recyclable and kinder to our planet.

The interview is part of Homa's first Green Paper. The introduction is curated by Federico Rebaudo, General Manager of Homa Europe, member and official spokes person of Homa ESG Steering Committee.

Copyright HOMA 2023- Issued by Homa Marketing dept. on June 2023
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