Appliance Business Finds New Focus

Fred Landay has a couple thousand refrigerators at his aptly but not very creatively named Appliance Warehouse on the South Side.

He's got three-fridge-high stacks of the traditional white ones. Also well represented in the airy, 40,000-square-foot space is the whole spectrum of dated designer colors -- harvest gold, avocado, coppertone, and more turquoise than any place this side of "That '70s Show" or a Navajo jewelry shop.

Most don't work.

And that's OK with him.

The 46-year-old Landay, an appliance retailer for 27 years, has refocused his business on recycling. Last month, he started a home appliance disposal service that has swollen the number of used refrigerators, air conditioners, freezers, dehumidifiers and water coolers he picks up to about 1,000 a week.

Except for a small percentage that Landay fixes and resells -- "the best way to recycle" -- they are shredded at Tube City in West Mifflin, producing about 400,000 pounds of scrap metal a month.

"I'm a retailer first, but with the 'big box' stores, there's no way for an independent to survive. We're buying new appliances for the same price they're selling them at," said Landay.

"But everybody's got something, some appliance, sitting around that they don't know how to get rid of. Now they've got a viable option to putting it out on the curb for the trash pickup. They can recycle."

Landay's company has had contracts with several big box retailers and appliance manufacturers for more than a decade to pick up "haul aways" -- the old household appliances replaced by new appliances purchased from those stores.

Those have always been recycled and, according to the Steel Recycling Institute, are the biggest reason 85 percent of the 50 million household appliances annually discarded by Americans end up on the recycling side of the waste stream.

But what of the other 15 percent -- actually 25 percent in Pennsylvania, where 75 percent of household appliances are recycled?

"I've got a refrigerator in my basement with a case of beer in it, but the main reason I keep it is I can't get it out," said Bill Heenan, president of the Steel Recycling Institute. "What this program will do is help the elderly and others get those old refrigerators out of their basements."

Landay, who is a member of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Household Hazardous Waste Task Force, said most old residential appliances that are not hauled away by retailers eventually find their way to a landfill, where operators may or may not pull them out for recycling.

His new residential appliance disposal program, operating in Allegheny and Beaver counties for the past month, has already recycled more than 200 refrigerators that otherwise would have been loaded onto garbage trucks and dumped into landfills.

"I visited all 130 municipalities in Allegheny County over the summer and explained the program and had no resistance. Beaver County also went with it," he said. "Now, when residents call municipal, city or county offices to ask what to do with an old refrigerator or other appliance, they are told about our program."

The disposal program -- the only one operating in Pennsylvania -- expanded into Westmoreland County last week.

Landay's appliance disposal service isn't free, but it can cost less than putting a refrigerator out on the curb for trash pickup.

That's because most municipalities won't pick it up unless it has been tagged by a plumber to certify that its refrigerant, a gas called Freon, has been drained and disposed of according to Clean Air Act regulations. Freon is a combination of chlorofluorocarbons, which when released can deplete the ozone in the upper atmosphere that protects Earth from harmful radiation. The Freon recovery procedure and certification can cost $50 or more.

Pittsburgh trash haulers haven't picked up refrigerators and other Freon-containing appliances, drained or not, since 1991.

The Appliance Warehouse program has three options. People can drop off the appliances at a county center for $20 plus tax. They can request curbside pickup for $34.95 plus tax. Or they can ask for in-home pickup for $52.95 plus tax.

"The collection program started on a limited basis in June and now we're getting about 30 calls a day to pick up refrigerators at people's houses," Landay said. "The original idea was to send out a full truck to deliver new appliances and come back with a truck full of used appliances for disposal. But the program's going so well now we just send out separate trucks for the disposals. We're running nonstop."

Appliances that still contain Freon are trucked to Appliance Warehouse, which is certified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to remove and capture the Freon. After the refrigerant is captured in 40 pound tanks that look like the propane tanks used on gas grills, it is taken to a recycler for cleaning and shipped to Peru, where it is reused.

Appliance Warehouse also has a contract with the city of Pittsburgh to dispose of appliances pulled out of illegal city dumps during periodic cleanups. The most recent "Clean Sweep" program last month garnered 164 refrigerators.

Landay estimates that the residential pickup program and the collection of illegally dumped appliances in Allegheny and Beaver counties will recycle 10,000 refrigerators a year that otherwise would have gone into landfills.

That's a coup, even though Pennsylvania has plenty of landfill space. Twenty-two other states with more limited landfill space have banned in-ground appliance disposal and, as a consequence, have more robust recycling programs.

An eight-year-old recycling program in southern California, for example, recently shredded its 300,000th refrigerator for scrap.

The state Department of Environmental Protection is interested in expanding the program statewide, and Landay already is working in Erie and Altoona to establish regional appliance collection sites.

"We've talked to him about it and encouraged him to work on it on a county-by-county level," said Carl Hursh, DEP chief of waste reduction and recycling. "We recycle 500,000 tons of appliances or 'white goods' a year, but what's missing are the appliances sent to landfills."

Hursh said the state passed its goal of recycling 35 percent of its total waste stream in August, two years ahead of schedule, but is still seeking to increase recycling.

According to a study by the National Recycling Coalition, recycling and reuse is a $23.4 billion industry in Pennsylvania, involving 3,247 businesses, government agencies and nonprofit groups and more than 81,300 people.

"Since recycling has tremendous economic benefits for the state," Hursh said, "we'd like to see every bit of it happening that we can."