DUH calls for stricter recycling controls

GERMANY: The German green group DUH has called for stricter controls and new legal standard after describing refrigerator recycling in the country as “flawed”.

According to the DUH, nearly 3,000,000 refrigerators are disposed of in Germany each year, more than half of which still contain CFCs. Many German states have no facilities for disposal of refrigeration equipment and others are achieving recovery rates well below industry standards.

A survey of the German states requesting the quantities of CFCs recovered from old refrigerators and freezers received figures from only five states, with only the data from three being actually meaningful. Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg claimed to have no facilities for disposal of refrigeration equipment, while Baden-Württemberg, Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein claimed an average of 63% of the CFCs are properly removed from refrigeration equipment and disposed of.

Describing the fact that 10 states had no meaningful figures for CFC elimination as a scandal, DUH national manager Jürgen Resc said “Actual CFC removal quantities in Germany are probably well below the currently established 63% as in previous studies of DUH.”

Being that European standards set minimum recovery rates at 90% prompted Jürgen Resc to describe the German recovery figures as “a blatant abuse with substantial consequences for climate protection.”