Thetford fire and plant closures disrupted fridge recycling
The Guardian’s Sam Wollaston reported on October 21, 2026, that 26 UK local authorities had to stop accepting fridges and freezers for recycling this summer as specialist processing capacity contracted. Piles were reported in Nottinghamshire, Durham, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Newport, where a mountain of 80,000 appliances accumulated over the summer. The report said the old appliances had no proper disposal date in sight.
Norfolk’s pile-up followed an April fire at an electrical waste and treatment facility in Thetford. The fire meant there was nowhere to recycle fridges and freezers for two or three months, and the disruption caused a pile-up. Kate Murrell, Norfolk council’s assistant director of waste management, said, “If you got a new fridge and took the old one to the tip, they turned you away.” Record-breaking summer temperatures then caused more fridges and freezers to break down and prompted some processing plants to shut temporarily. Murrell also said, “During Covid, people upped their refrigeration capacity at home,” leaving more appliances to deal with.
After the Thetford fire, Norfolk council ran out of treatment facilities to which it could send fridges. Thetford was one of just eight full-scale processing plants for fridges in the UK. A major plant in south Wales shut down when the recycling company Unimetals filed for liquidation, and a plant in the West Midlands closed in February because of a fire.
Jon Hubbard, chair of the Local Government Association’s neighbourhoods committee, said, “It’s nationwide. I’m hearing more and more reports of councils struggling. In my own local authority in Wiltshire, I see large quantities of fridges and freezers piling up. It’s certainly not getting any better.”
At Little Hautbois, a tiny Norfolk hamlet, the former Mayton Wood recycling centre lies half a mile down a narrow country lane. A strip of gentle hillside is covered by large white rectangular blocks with coils on one face, doors and handles on the other and manufacturers’ names, forming what the report described as a glacier of fridges numbering more than 3,000. A security fence and CCTV cameras surround the site. Compared with Newport’s 80,000-appliance mountain, the Norfolk site may not look so bad, though the stark contrast with its bucolic surroundings adds to the shock.
Murrell, who was present to let the reporter in, said, “It’s not what we want to see here, or what the local residents want to see either.” Stuart Brown, the nearest local resident, called the pile “a bit of an eyesore” over his garden fence.
Not much was happening in the tiny Norfolk hamlet on the day of the visit. The pub once popular with airmen from RAF Coltishall had stopped being a pub a long time ago, even before RAF Coltishall stopped being RAF Coltishall. The visit was not on a Saturday, so there were no weddings at Hautbois Hall, and it was not 19 May, when the restless, headless ghost of Thomas Boleyn is said to drive his carriage across the bridge over the River Bure, on the anniversary of the execution of his daughter, Anne.
David Santillo, a senior scientist with Greenpeace Research Laboratories, based at the University of Exeter, said fridges and freezers contain gases and materials that can harm the environment if the appliances are not dismantled correctly. He said UK law requires fridges to be dismantled at specialist processing plants, whose number is shrinking rapidly in the UK. Santillo identified refrigerants as the main danger and said, “Lots of different chemicals are used as refrigerants. Very old fridges could contain CFCs, which are ozone-depleting substances. There are almost certainly going to be HFCs, which are potent greenhouse gases. Others will contain propane and isobutane. Commercial fridges can contain ammonia.” Once removed and isolated, he said, refrigerants can be recycled and reused or, in the case of some older appliances, incinerated. Insulation foams can contain hazardous substances such as fluorinated compounds and must also be recycled or incinerated.
Santillo said, “Recycling fridges should be about containment.” He explained: “You have to take the refrigerant out, contain it, then that goes on for further treatment. That’s clearly broken down and they’re just being dumped. They certainly shouldn’t be left to fall apart and fragment in the environment.” Murrell said the more recent-looking appliances probably were in working order. Owners often dispose of appliances because they want an “upgrade, or it’s a new kitchen and they want one that fits in with this, not that,” she said. Some appliances were not built to last or were impossible to repair.
Santillo said manufacturers could find ways to make appliances last longer: “They could find ways of making them last longer. They’re a significant investment and some of them aren’t very robust.” He said the loss of repair options also encouraged replacement. “The weakest link is always the compressor; once that goes, it becomes so expensive to fix that people tend to just get a new fridge,” he said.
Hubbard said producer compliance schemes coordinate the collection, recycling and disposal of fridges and freezers in the UK under the idea that the polluter pays. Because treatment capacity had been hit so hard, producers had not been able to keep up, leaving councils to handle and fund the collection, storage and treatment of the goods. “We’re picking up the phone, and they’re not answering,” Hubbard said of the schemes. He said: “They need to come up with a proper business plan to get back up to full-scale recycling again. In the short term, they need to come up with a solution to storage.” Hubbard said the costs were taking money that should be spent elsewhere: “It’s costing money that should be spent on libraries, sports centres, fixing potholes, delivering health and social care.”
Murrell said more help needed to come from central government: “What the country needs is a more resilient infrastructure to deal with fridges and freezers at the end of their lives.” Norfolk was accepting fridges at only seven of its 19 recycling sites, the most it could manage. Murrell said, “That’s a way of reducing the volumes we get in.” She added, “Customers might have to travel a bit further and so think twice about disposal at the moment.”
An image caption in The Guardian report said fly-tipping was increasing while recycling centres could not accept fridges. Hubbard warned about the risk when council disposal services were forced to halt. He said, “Council-tax payers are being scammed by people who claim to be legitimate waste disposal organisations, collect your fridge and then dump it where they shouldn’t. And if that fridge can be tracked back to a resident, it’s the resident who gets prosecuted.” He advised people to take photographs of any disposal company’s licence.
Santillo raised an additional concern: “If you have piles of fridges and freezers, they’re going to become home to wildlife; they’re great places to attract animals that like to live in small spaces.” Murrell said pest control came in regularly and had not discovered any new residents gnawing away at fluorinated insulation. A kestrel hovered over the site.
A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs called the delays “frustrating” and said the minister responsible for waste crime had written to producer compliance schemes asking them “to take all reasonable steps to fix this fast, as this cannot go on any longer.” The spokesperson added: “We appreciate the challenges facing local authorities, and are working closely with them, the Environment Agency and industry to manage the impact of capacity shortages, including allowing temporary storage sites and looking at long-term solutions to ensure this does not happen again.”
The Little Hautbois site remained full, with no room for any more fridges. Murrell said the appliances already there were not going anywhere at the moment and that she was not hopeful that this would change soon. “Until we see national capacity really increase, councils like us are going to see disruption to the services,” she said. “I think this one’s stuck for quite a while.”