This is a question I get all the time when I am talking with homeowners about replacing their heating and cooling equipment. The short answer is “Yes We DO”; however I thought I would kind of run you through the process involved in “hauling it off”.
First of all if we are removing your air conditioning unit, we must first remove the refrigerant or “Freon” in the system. We do this by using a recovery machine and pulling it out of the air condition unit and pump it into a 30lb reclaim cylinder. Once the “Freon” is removed and all of the old equipment, material and scrap are loaded on our vans we haul all of this back to our warehouse.
At the warehouse we have a rack full of empty 30lb reclaim cylinders. Once we fill up a 30lb cylinder we swap it out for an empty one on the rack. The full cylinders are emptied into a large 325lb tank which will eventually be sent back to the manufacture for recycling and then the empty cylinder is placed on the empty rack to be reused. We then take the air conditioning units and separate the copper, refrigerant lines, coils and motors and store them in our warehouse. We will eventually haul these into the recycling center ourselves. All of the scrap metal, furnaces, steel and other recyclable material is then picked up by a “junk man” or scrap metal dealer. He will take this in to the recycle center himself. From time to time we will just give everything to the scrap dealer however with the recent increase in copper theft and coils there have been many laws passed and this has made it difficult for the legitimate scrappers.
The trash is then gone through to make sure we didn’t miss anything that is recyclable. All of our cardboard, wood, plastic, paper, etc is hauled off on a regular basis to a local recycle bin and the remainder is deposited in the dumpster.
So the short answer is: Yes we haul it off and take care of the mess for you, however the long answer is that there is a lot of work involved in making sure the recycle process is followed and we are not just wasting valuable space in our local landfills.