Ruined refrigerators have become a familiar, even evocative sight. Eventually, they will be a memory.

Sunday, November 27, 2005
By Bruce Hamilton
West Bank bureau

Each one is unique, with its own vile recipe on the inside and arcane decorations on the outside. Colored and metallic tape wraps them, forming angular interstices on each exterior's white plane. Many are affixed with kitschy mementos or splashed with ironic, political slogans: "You've done a great job, Brownie," for example.

Yet metropolitan New Orleans' largest public art project is about halfway over, and tens of thousands of its pieces have been destroyed, much to their owners' gratitude.

Contractors have processed 131,925 refrigerators for the Army Corps of Engineers as of Nov. 22, according to spokeswoman Lynn Duerod, and that figure is expected to reach a quarter-million before the job is done.

It is a systematic annihilation that takes skill, power and technology, as each one is disassembled and its materials recycled.

After they are lugged to the curb or neutral ground, the fridges are hauled by independent subcontractors to the landfill. Some of the subcontractors drive trucks equipped with cranes; others use other heavy machinery such as Bobcats to load them.

The food tombs are taken to nonpublic staging areas, where they are unloaded, emptied and compacted, then bulked for recycling. Those areas are typically landfills such as the Old Gentilly Landfill, where the overwhelming majority will be processed. Other parishes have staging areas outside landfills, such as Camp Villere in Slidell.

A grapple machine helps to empty their contents into trash bins, and workers wearing respirators and protective suits remove and bag the nastiness, which is taken separately to a sanitary landfill. Environmental Protection Agency crews then evacuate Freon from their coils and oil from their compressors.

The fridges are pressure-washed, then crushed by a portable bailer into a brick about 3 by 4 by 5 feet, according to Joel Dupre, president of Southern Scrap Material's New Orleans division. The company is recycling most of the region's funky fridges, which wind up at its 9th Ward facility.

"Contrary to popular belief, the 9th Ward is alive and kicking," he said.

The firm's shredder at 4801 Florida Ave. has processed more than 10,000 tons, according to Dupre. It takes in 20 to 25 truckloads daily at 22 tons per load. The shredder reduces each compacted fridge to pieces about the size of a fist, Dupre said.

The shredded material then goes through a series of high-tech separations that yields steel, other metals such as copper or aluminum and a byproduct called fluff that is landfilled. The metal becomes a commodity sold to smelters or manufacturers; the nonferrous material also goes to smelters or refineries.

At first, an air separation removes lighter materials such as insulation. Then, "we do a magnetic separation that pulls the steel out of the stream," Dupre said. "We also do eddy current, which generates an electromagnetic field." A second sort uses a Steinert separator, which detects metal and ejects it with a stream of air.

The company normally handles a lot of automobiles, and refrigerators are more problematic to recycle, Dupre said. "They have so much insulation," he said.

But Dupre is proud of his firm's contribution to the area's cleanup and its economy; his operation employs 100, he said.

They are a ubiquitous symbol, those Katrina fridges, featured in Tom Varisco Designs' new book "Spoiled" and the subject of Web sites such as www.katrinafridges.com. As a public display, they are more widespread than the recent works of Christo, such as The Gates project in Central Park, and more long-lasting.

But they won't be on your neutral ground for long. The fridges eventually will be reduced to their constituent parts. "We're sort of the last step in the renewal process," Dupre said.

. . . . . . .

Bruce Hamilton can be reached at bhamilton@timespicayune.com or (504)826-3786.