http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20877804

Somehow I never bought into the whole CFC threat, and going by that article, it was replaced with something worse

Surely the CFC's are already in those fridges regardless of whether they're scrapped now or after a few more years use by a Ghanan.

I think that the point is that Ghana is not equipped to deal with recycling CFC's or HFC's.

Surely if the method they've chosen to deal with fridges with CFCs is 'ship them to Ghana' it's unlikely the places they're coming from do either...

recycling at its best
makes me wonder why i bother

why recycle when it can simply be dumped overseas and i have no doubt that they make money on/out of this at our expense ...

I'm not sure how much of this gas that's 20% worse than CO2 a fridge holds. But I'm going to make an educated guess (based on my extensive scientific know-how) that it is less than a fridge full. Which doesn't seem like that much.

I'm fairly sure the CFC thing was true, but the global warming HFC threat sounds a bit dubious. It only makes sense if the quantity of CO2 emitted to provide electricity for the fridge over its lifetime is similar or less than the volume of HFC used in its manufacture. But my suspicion is that it could fill the fridge many times over.

There is uproar currently in the automotive industry. When CFCs were banned (R134a or Tetraflourothan), the German manufacturers started looking at using airconditioners that used CO2. This was expensive, as it required a different design for the AC unit, it was however much more efficient.

The the chemical industry came along with an alternative, R1234yf, which would work, with little modification, in traditional AC units. Pressure was put on the manufacturers to switch to R1234yf, as it was a much cheaper solution and manufacturers outside Germany switched and the German manufacturers reluctantly followed suit and stopped development of CO2 units.

Testing by Mercedes in 2012 showed that the gas is highly flammable and if it escapes under the bonnet, when the motor is warm, it can lead to fire or explosion. They have now shown their tests to the EU and other manufactures and are asking the EU to prolong the life of R134a in order to find a suitable replacement, as R1234yf is too dangerous - R123a should be phased out this year and R1234yf would be mandatory in 2014.

Now the manufacturers have to find either a non-flammable alternative to R1234yf or re-start their CO2 projects, which would also increase the cost of cars with ACs.

ADAC (German) link

I think that there is no way for the UK to actually recycle CFC's so they have to stored hence the fridge mountain a few years ago. IIRC there was only one place in Europe capable of recycling CFC's some years ago, and it had a backlog of work. Exporting to Ghana was simply dumping.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/10/25/3618542.htm was interesting. The hole in the ozone layer is shrinking, so it would seem the approach to not using CFCs has been the right one.