A fridge leaves your kitchen on a handcart and that is the last you see of it. Most people have no idea what happens next, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on who took it.
This is what should happen, what often does happen instead, and why the difference matters more for a fridge than for almost anything else in your house.
Why a fridge is not like other scrap
A washing machine is mostly steel, copper and a motor. Take it apart carelessly and you make a mess. A fridge is different, because a fridge contains gas.
There are two lots of it. The refrigerant circulating through the coils, and the blowing agent trapped in the foam insulation inside the walls and door. Older Indian fridges typically used R-12 or R-134a refrigerant. Newer ones mostly use R-600a, which is isobutane.
R-12 damages the ozone layer and has been phased out under the Montreal Protocol. R-134a does not harm ozone but is a strong greenhouse gas, with a warming effect per kilogram more than a thousand times that of carbon dioxide. R-600a is much better environmentally and is also flammable, which is its own handling problem.
All of which means the first job with any fridge is recovering the gas before anything is cut. That is the step that gets skipped.
What happens in a yard that does it properly
The sequence is roughly this.
Degassing. The refrigerant circuit is tapped and the gas is pumped into a recovery cylinder rather than released. The compressor oil comes out at the same time, because it carries dissolved refrigerant and is a contaminant in its own right.
Stripping. Shelves, drawers and door seals come out. The compressor is removed whole. It is the heaviest single part and the most valuable, because it is a dense block of steel wrapped around a copper motor winding.
Separating the metals. The cabinet is steel. The condenser coils on the back are copper or aluminium. The internal liner is plastic. Each goes to a different place, and separating them properly is most of what decides the value.
The insulation. This is the part almost nobody handles well. The foam between the inner and outer walls holds blowing agent, and the only way to capture it is to shred the foam in a sealed chamber and capture what comes off. It needs equipment that most yards do not have.
What usually happens instead
Walk past a roadside scrap operation and you will see fridges being cut open with an angle grinder in the open air. The gas vents into the atmosphere. The foam is pulled out by hand and burned or dumped. The compressor is sold, the steel is sold, and the parts that are hard to handle are the parts that get thrown away.
It is not malice. Recovering gas properly needs a recovery unit, a cylinder and somewhere to send the recovered refrigerant. None of that pays for itself on a single fridge, so a person working from a cart cannot do it and stay in business.
That is the real cost of the cheapest possible collection, and it is a cost you never see.
The part that comes back
A typical domestic fridge yields something like 35 to 45 kilograms of steel, a few kilograms of copper and aluminium between the compressor windings and the coils, and several kilograms of mixed plastic. Recycled steel takes a fraction of the energy that new steel from iron ore does. Copper can be remelted without any loss of quality, which is why copper from a fridge built in the 1990s is as good as copper from a mine.
The plastics are harder. Fridge liners are usually polystyrene or ABS, and mixed household plastic is difficult to do anything useful with. Some of it gets recycled and some of it does not, and anyone who tells you all of it does is overstating things.
What you can do about it
You have more influence over this than you might think, because it is decided at the moment you hand the fridge over. Three things worth asking whoever collects it.
- What happens to the gas? If the answer is vague or the question seems to confuse them, the gas is going into the air.
- Where does it go after it leaves? A collector who can name where material goes is a collector who has thought about it.
- Do I get anything in writing? For a household this matters less. For an office replacing twenty units it matters a lot.
The other thing worth knowing: a working fridge is worth more alive than dead. If it still cools and it is under about ten years old, someone will buy it as a fridge. Ask before you scrap it.
Being straight about where we are
We collect fridges and we are direct about what that means. ScrapWise is a collector. We are not a recycling plant and we do not hold any CPCB registration. What we do is collect from your door, pay you a price agreed in front of you, and move the material on.
We would rather say that plainly than let a page of green language imply something we cannot back up. The e-waste business in India has a lot of that, and it is one of the reasons people do not trust it.
Where we are trying to get to is handling more of the chain ourselves, starting with batteries, and eventually recovering the materials that currently get imported. That is a plan, not a claim about today.
Getting a fridge collected
Tell us roughly what you have and pick a slot. We come to you, we look at it, and the price is agreed in front of you before anything moves. If it needs to come down a staircase, mention it when you book so we send enough people.
Coming to collect costs you nothing, in Hyderabad and in Bengaluru. Book at scrapwise.in or message +91 99931 99945.
