A recently published study, conducted by the Austrian research institute FHA GmbH and commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management in Vienna and the RAL Quality Assurance Association for the Demanufacture of Refrigeration Equipment, has cast new light on the treatment of end-of-life refrigeration appliances containing hydrocarbons.

The study aimed, for example, to compare batch processing and joint processing modes and to determine how the CFC and HC recovery rates achieved in joint processing compare with those in batch processing. The tests were performed on the recycling plant operated by AVE Österreich GmbH in Salzburg, which established last year the joint processing of CFC and HC appliances as its standard method of treatment in accordance with the requirements of the Austrian Waste Treatment Obligation Ordinance (Abfallbehandlungspflichten-Verordnung). An interesting ‘by-product’ of the FHA study was the information it provided concerning the missorting of appliances at the recycling plant (around 1.6%).

A further important part of the study was the rigorous computation of the relative proportions of CFC and HC appliances in the waste refrigeration equipment sent for treatment in future. The need to have plants capable of recovering CFCs from waste refrigeration equipment will remain until well past the year 2020 and it will be around 2014 before recyclers see about 50% CFC appliances and 50% HC appliances. Also, the fact that the hydrocarbons recovered during the batch processing of supposedly pure HC appliances contain around 20% CFCs and other volatile hydrocarbon derivatives is another reason why HC appliances and CFC appliances must not be treated separately, reveals the association’s press release.