Environmental Effects Of The Fridge Essay

Effects of the Fridge

1) Social

Before the invention of fridge, food often would not be stored for a few days without spoiling it which becomes inedible. The technology of refrigeration allows the temperature to be lowered down to an extent that food can be stored for days, weeks or even months. It also slows down the growth of most of the microorganisms.

Generally, storage of fridge can be categorized into 5 areas (Figure 8.1). Each of them has its own usefulness and you can arrange them accordingly to your food which brings tidiness and convenience to fridge. Moreover, a proper arrangement of food storage can extend the freshness of food longer (Pescow, R., 2013). For example, most of the people will put their condiments or sauces at the door of the fridge because they can be easily picked up by them.

One of the most common disadvantages of fridges is that they are environmentally unfriendly and dangerous if not disposed of properly. It contains refrigerant that can be damaging to the environment because of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) content. (Refer to figure 8.6) The material is suspected to be the cause of depletion of the earth’s ozone layer. (Refer to figure 8.7) Ozone layer is important to human because it filters ultraviolet radiation from the Sun that causes skin cancer, sunburn and eye conditions.

After that, one of the biggest disadvantages of the fridge is the cost of to run it. It takes approximately one-sixth of the electricity that you use at home along with the freezer and it was even worse than this when our parents are still using the earlier models of this. According to figure 8.8, the difference between the cost of running a 30 year old and a fairly standard modern ‘A’ rated freezer is £106/year. A super-efficient A++ rated fridge freezer would save £133/year at 2010 electricity prices (T2c.org.uk,