Greetings:
I am in the process of developing a high efficiency clothes washer rebate program for a water utility. We do not want to landfill the old units and were wondering if anyone had any innovative ideas on what could be done with the old machines. Your input and advice would be much appreciated.
Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.
Denise Rue-Pastin
Clothes Washer Recycling
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Most scrap dealers welcome washing machines. They are made of high-quality stell and are highly recyclable.
Aren't major appliances usually recycled for their scrap metal?
Fred Stepanis,
Assistant Conservation Division
Town of Barnstable
200 Main Street
Hyannis, MA 02601
phone: 508-862-4046
e-mail: [email protected]
Our landfill takes the appliances and recycles them. They have a special area where you drop them off. Anything you can do to make it easier encourages people to participate, and it works well.
When I was ED of Ecology Action in Austin in the 1980s, we had a contract to manage a salvage/recycling center at the city landfill. We worked with salvagers to take old appliances for parts salvage as well as repair and resale as a first resort. We contracted with scrap metal dealers to pick up unsold steel appliances together with other scrap steel for recycling as the next tier of recovery, and removed higher value items like copper and aluminum components and tubing for separate sale. We also set up freon recovery for refrigerators, AC units and other items arriving with compressed refrigerants still inside. So, if you want to eliminate old inefficient appliances from being used again, be sure the recovery arrangement puts them directly into a system that immediately renders them unusable. Options include tipping them directly into top-loading roll-off containers for scrap metal, or using a baler, flattener or compactor to crush them for loading into containers or vehicles for transport to a scrap metal facility. There may also be a premium value for electric motors sold separately if you can remove them first.
Bill Carter
Water Quality Monitoring & Assessment MC
165 Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
P.O. Box 13087 Austin, TX 78711-3087
Phone: 512-239-6771
Fax: 512-239-4410
[email protected]
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