GreenSpace: Cold war on the inefficient old fridge

The eco-culprits were lined up crookedly, like a ragtag group of reluctant soldiers.

Their out-of-date colors hinted at their crimes:

Avocado green.

Harvest gold.

Coppertone brown.

They were old refrigerators. Even ancient, some might say. I had harvest gold appliances in the '70s.

Unlike other older units, the problem isn't that these geriatric fridges break.

The problem is, they still work.

When many people get snazzy newbies, they still hang onto the oldsters, which often go into the basement with the best of intentions - keeping beer cold and helping with parties - but also the worst of consequences.

The older refrigerators are horribly inefficient, some using four times the electricity of newer models to do the same amount of cooling.

The one rusting away in your basement is also sucking $150 to $200 a year out of your pocketbook.

Older fridges are also problematic for utilities. They're trying to reduce electric usage as a way to avoid building new plants.

Today, utilities are so intent on prying these old fridges out of our homes that they'll pay us to let them do it.

Peco and PPL both offer $35 per fridge and will send out a truck to pick it up.

The units wind up in Hatfield at a facility owned by Jaco Environmental, based outside Seattle.

Here, starting from the motley lineup, they get sliced, diced, sucked dry of refrigerant, and otherwise dismantled and "demanufactured," the parts recycled.

Left in basements or carted off to landfills, "refrigerators are environmental time bombs," says Michael Dunham, Jaco's director of energy and environment.

Yet who knew the resources in a single fridge: 150 pounds of metal, 25 pounds of plastic, 3 pounds of glass.

Jaco sends the steel off to become the rebar that's often used in highways. "So you might some day be driving over your old refrigerator," Dunham is fond of saying.

The plastics are turned into electronics, such as your cell phone. So, yes, you might one day be talking on your old refrigerator.

The glass is tempered, so it can't be made into bottles. But it winds up as the sparkly stuff in countertops and some cements. It's also used as an aerator in potting soil.

The aluminum often becomes cans, winding up back in a different refrigerator.

The refrigerant - several kinds are all potent greenhouse gases - is destroyed.

The mercury found in some old thermostats gets cleaned and reused. Ditto the oil.