Heatwave blamed for fridge breakdown boom

A recycling plant in Telford says it handled a record number of fridges over the summer as the hot weather caused more appliances to break down.

Retailer AO, which operates the Halesfield plant, said June and August were its busiest months ever for fridge recycling.

Summer 2026 was the UK's hottest on record, according to the Met Office, leading to more white goods failing and needing to be scrapped.

Dave Ware, commercial director at AO, said the company was potentially having its biggest year, with between 570,000 and 580,000 fridges coming through its doors.

"What we had was... the hottest temperatures ever, and high temperatures kill fridges in a household," he said.

Ware said the length of this summer's heatwaves had made it particularly challenging, as it meant a longer peak in the number of units being recycled.

"The volume of fridges being recycled across the country was significantly higher than we've ever seen, and for a much longer period of time. The peak is usually seven to 10 days; we're talking five to six weeks," he said.

In August, dozens of councils were forced to stop collecting white goods because of a major backlog, caused by a national shortage of the specialist facilities needed to safely process the appliances.

The backlog was made worse by the closure of three of the UK's 10 full-scale processing plants in the past 14 months, while the remaining sites cannot operate in temperatures above 30C.

Ware said keeping the plant's 80-tonne crushing machine, Bertha, cool was important in order to safely remove pollutants from the appliances.

"We've got some investments coming in terms of cooling the plant more, so we don't have that downtime, and we've also invested in a little bit more storage space as a buffer if there was a problem," he said.

He added that the company had already started planning for a possible surge in fridges and freezers needing recycling next summer if it was as hot as 2026.

"We haven't started taking bets in the office yet on what that's going to be... but I'm learning about El Niño and the effects of that," Ware said.

"It's trying to predict the unpredictable, which is the British summer."

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