The UK's first fridge and freezer recycling plant has been opened in Newport, south Wales.

It will be Europe's largest dedicated fridge recycling facility, dealing with around 400,000 domestic and commercial appliances a year from across Britain.

Around 30,000 units are waiting to be disposed of in the city alone, following a change in European environmental laws.

MPs warned recently that clearing the backlog of Britain's discarded items could cost �40m.

The fridge stockpile is growing

The multi-million pound investment, unveiled on Monday, has been assisted with funding from the Welsh Assembly.

It follows UK-wide concerns about the growing "mountain" of old fridges awaiting disposal.

The new facility will receive items from all parts of Britain. As many as �1m old appliances have had to be stockpiled at local authority dumps because the correct technology is not in place to recycle them properly.

The House of Commons Environment Committee has said the debacle will cost the taxpayer �40m.

Impregnated

It criticised the government for not acting quickly enough and European bureaucrats for not explaining clearly enough the requirements of their recycling initiative.

Any fridge which is six years old is likely to have an insulation lining impregnated with CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), the chemicals which have been blamed for thinning the ozone layer over the South and North Poles.

A European law which came into force at the beginning of this year requires that this gas be extracted and destroyed before the rest of the fridge is recycled.

This means the appliances can no longer be exported to developing countries or buried underground - the fate that once befell most of the 2.5m fridges thrown out every year.

Recycling everywhere was put on hold

But treating them properly needs specialist equipment.

The UK only has about a tenth of the recycling capacity needed, and failed to build more in time for the 1 January deadline for the introduction of the new regulation.

Any fridge disposed of since the beginning of 2002 has either been stacked by a local council or sent to an approved facility abroad - both expensive options.

More dedicated disposal and recycling plants are being built and the backlog should be cleared by the end of 2003.

Stephen Davison, of Newport City Council, told BBC Breakfast: "We only had a lead-in time of three or four months to find places to dispose of fridges.

"Clearly there were no places to dispose of them fully and we had to put them in store, but it's been very difficult to find sites."