Pile of appliances disposed of by Clinton and area residents during post-evacuation clean up/via Adriana Mailloux
With the main cleanup of ruined refrigerators and freezers in Clinton now complete, the final tally is providing a bit more insight into the hidden costs — and potential for profitability — of disaster recovery here in BC.
While the Thompson Nicola Regional District is still accepting contaminated fridges and freezers at the local Eco-Depot, the Village of Clinton and the Thompson Nicola Regional District recently wrapped up a massive curbside collection program, gathering a few hundred major appliances that residents couldn’t salvage following the Pear Lake wildfire evacuations.
It was an unfortunate set of timelines and circumstances which led to a glut of massive appliances being fast-tracked to the recycling depot before their useable lifetime had even started to expire.
As most folks in Clinton were enroute on July 24th to Kamloops and the Emergency Support Services centre established for them at MacArthur Island, the Pear Lake fire was not only threatening an assault on the Village, it had begun taking down BC Hydro’s infrastructure in the area as well.
As a result, the power went out just hours after most people had cleared the Village, meaning there was no time — or pre-warning — that power on their now-inaccessible property would be down until such time as they could get back home and flip the breaker.
The timeline was a major factor in being able to recover fridges and freezers in the Village and the TNRD areas… but so too was the weather.
Average daytime temperatures during the three-weeks people in Clinton were out of their homes was in the low-to-mid-30’s.
At that point, the only hope many had heading back into their homes was that the build-up of fermenting gases didn’t blow open the door or lid of their appliances and create an even wider mess that couldn’t be shipped out the front door.
In disaster recovery circles, these ruined appliances are almost universally known as ‘stinkers.’
The term refers to units where a lack of power and heat have caused the contents to liquefy into a putrid biohazard — often referred to as ‘bioslime’ — that permeates the plastic insulation of the fridge.
For residents brave enough to try and save a ‘stinker,’ the cleaning process is grueling.
It requires heavy-duty masks and gloves to double-bag the rotting meat, followed by repeated scrub-downs using hot soapy water, heavy bleach solutions, and baking soda.
Remains of ‘bioslime’ underneath a refrigerator/via Alabama-bio-clean
Crucially, homeowners must also dismantle the bottom of the fridge to bleach the hidden drip pan, where liquefied meat juices often pool.
Even after days of airing the unit out with activated charcoal or rolled-up newspaper stuffed inside, the smell often proves impossible to permanently erase.
Aware of what many home owners were likely facing upon their return, the Regional District expected quite a few takers for their collection campaign, which covered the Village of Clinton, as well as areas to the south of the Village, and to the northeast along the Highway 97 corridor toward Chasm.
“You never know exactly what’s going to happen when you run a curbside collection program in terms of quantities and numbers. Some folks choose to keep their appliance and clean it out and continue using it,” noted Adriana Mailloux, TNRD Manager of Solid Waste and Recycling.
But given the demographics and social make up of the south Cariboo, expectations were that a fair amount of chest freezers would be given over for recycling.
“In Clinton, where you have quite a few folks that are hunters, you end up with maybe a lot more freezers than you would have in some other communities,” added Mailloux.
In the Village itself, the crews would conduct ‘sweeps’ of the community, checking in on 430 separate homes to ensure that if nothing was waiting for them near the street, that the owners weren’t living with an appliance they couldn’t manage to get to the curb themselves.
Because there are no ‘curbsides’ in the rural areas, the TNRD would ask those folks to call ahead for service.
In the end, this would see 35 different TNRD property owners ask for help in getting rid of their fridges and freezers.
A precise number — 300 appliances — were eventually collected and transported to the local eco-depot in Clinton.
Collection of discarded fridges and freezers at the TNRD’s Eco-Depot in Clinton/via TNRD
READ MORE: The ‘Stinker’ Statistics
The industrial disposal process for a major appliance is far more grueling than simply dumping them into a landfill and hoping that time will do its work.
Because smashing a refrigerator would rupture its cooling lines and release illegal, ozone-depleting gases into the atmosphere, the units must be carefully dismantled.
First, biohazard crews wearing heavy protective gear must manually pry open the sealed doors and shovel the liquefied, rotting food into specialized waste bags.
Fridge left without power for several days/via Alabama Bio-Clean
Only after the units are hosed down with an alcohol-bleach solution to kill the remaining bacteria and noxious odors are they turned over to technicians for their second purge.
The main reason fridges and freezers are recycled — even under the most trying and vile of circumstances — is that the vast majority of household cooling units employ freon as the cooling agent.
After a hosing down to ensure the appliance wasn’t carrying any stow-away surprises and to rid it of most of its noxious odors, the units would then be turned over to technicians for its second purge.
The main reason fridges and freezers are recycled — even under the most trying and vile of circumstances — is that the vast majority of household cooling units employ freon as the cooling agent.
“If it’s released in the environment, it is an ozone-depleting substance, so they do need to be serviced by a certified technician so that they’re properly handled,” noted Recycling Manager Mailloux.
Once cleared of its ODS — the acronym for coolant in the recycling world — the units are then crushed and torn apart for their metal and other materials of value for the recycling industry.
The Thompson Nicola Regional District was initially worried the $40,000 to $50,000 disposal bill for the Clinton cleanup would fall on local taxpayers.
However, an industry group known as the Major Appliance and Recycling Roundtable, or MARR, stepped in to cover the costs.
Current Board of Directors of the Major Appliance Recycling Roundtable in BC/via marrbc.ca
MARR is a not-for-profit, industry-led agency that was created in 2012 to manage the end-of-life recycling of major household appliances across the province.
The organization was formed out of legal necessity after the provincial government enacted a law based on the environmental concept of “Extended Producer Responsibility.”
This law legally requires the companies who manufacture and sell consumer products to take financial and operational responsibility for their products once consumers are finished with them.
READ MORE: MARR’s assistance helpful, not entirely altruistic
While the appliance industry’s Extended Producer Responsibility laws ultimately saved Clinton and TNRD taxpayers from a sizeable massive bill, other provincial regulations have been blamed for holding back rebuilding efforts elsewhere in the Regional District’s sphere.
In the Village of Lytton, which was nearly wiped off the map by a wildfire in 2021, the provincial Heritage Conservation Act is pointed to as one of the key factors behind why many who lost homes have decided not to rebuild.
Under the loosely worded legislation, burned out home owners in Lytton found themselves being asked to spend tens of thousands of dollars out-of-pocket for archaeological monitoring just to dig a foundation—a regulatory cost that private insurance refuses to cover.
One of the other major challenges facing rural home owners in their recovery is the lack of available insurance coverage itself.
While the insurance sector in BC has been proactive when it comes to helping people from wildfire zones settle claims and get their process fast-tracked, a sizeable number of folks who have been burned out of their homes in recent years did not have home insurance coverage.
At first blush, one would argue that lack of insurance is on the home owner for not factoring in the ‘what if’ potential, which is how insurance companies make money.
But for owners who have established their homes outside a fire protection area, or in an area that is considered a higher likelihood to live through a forest fire, the insurance costs are often times unrealistic, with some people living in certain areas of the TNRD being asked to pay as much as $14,000 per year for coverage.
This is an issue that urban board members of the Regional District intend to put to the BC government at the forthcoming Union of BC Municipalities convention in hopes a solution for basis fire insurance can be worked out.
A breakdown of the local collection data presents a striking comparison to a similar situation 10 years ago in Fort McMurray, Alberta.
Among the 430 homes in the Village of Clinton and the 35 rural properties in the TNRD catchment, the cleanup zone encompassed 465 households.
With exactly 300 appliances collected, we can calculate the exact disposal rate for the region:
- Total Evacuated Households: 465
- Total Appliances Disposed: 300
- Clinton Disposal Rate: 64.5 percent
That local data seems to align somewhat with the massive cleanup effort following the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in northern Alberta:
- Total Evacuated Households: 24,000
- Total Appliances Disposed: 15,000
- Fort McMurray Disposal Rate: 62.6 percent
Somewhat surprisingly, the federal agencies that manage disaster recovery do not have — or at least publish — a universal baseline for predicting these numbers, and subsequently the costs associated with their disposal.
Models used by emergency planning agencies often just calculate the volume of human and/or natural debris (see: remains of homes and torched shrubs and trees on a property) in a disaster zone, and then break that down into the amount of cubic meters or yards worth of that material needs to be collected and transported out.
It’s a fairly solid way to assess the cost of a clean up.
But in BC’s case, things get a bit more murky.
Debate over the merits of DRIPA aside, the Heritage Preservation Act does require that any rebuilding on
That analysis is done in m/y3, which gives them a sense of just how much heavy machinery and human power will be needed to clean up a disaster area.
However, because refrigerators contain ozone-depleting Freon and putrescent biohazards, they are explicitly excluded from those volume formulas and must be handled individually.
The recycling industry struggles to establish a universal baseline because the disposal rate is entirely dependent on the type of disaster.
In a major flood like Hurricane Katrina, the water physically destroys the appliance, resulting in a near 100 percent disposal rate that saw the EPA process hundreds of thousands of units across Louisiana.
In a wildfire evacuation, the appliance itself is physically unharmed, meaning the damage is entirely internal and caused by the rotting food.
This introduces the variable of human behavior, as some residents will choose to clean the unit while others will tape it shut and drag it to the curb.
Because federal guidelines don’t account for this “human factor,” the data from Fort McMurray and Clinton provides a highly accurate, real-world benchmark of roughly 65 percent for future wildfire recovery planning.
While MARR operates as a not-for-profit, the sheer volume of appliances sold in British Columbia means the agency manages a massive annual budget.
According to the organization’s recent financial disclosures, the agency routinely generates revenues that far exceed its immediate operational expenses.
The agency reported revenues exceeding $9 million, while its operational expenses hovered just over $6 million dollars.
Under the strict rules governing provincial stewardship programs, this $3 million dollar surplus must be held by the non-profit in a legally mandated reserve fund to deal with catastrophic, unbudgeted contingencies.
Graphics showing MARR’s revenue projections compared to its expendatures/via MARR 2025 annual Report
It is this exact multi-million-dollar reserve fund that is currently being deployed to cover the estimated $45,000 hazardous waste disposal costs happening in Clinton.
However, while MARR’s decision to cover the disaster disposal bill is a massive relief for the community, the power outage itself is unlikely to hurt the bottom line of the major appliance manufacturers that govern the agency.
With 300 appliances destroyed, residents will inevitably need to purchase replacements.
Based on local demographics, the TNRD estimates a ratio of 1.75 chest freezers for every 1 refrigerator lost in the region. Out of the 300 units collected, that breaks down to approximately 109 refrigerators and 191 freezers.
Using conservative retail averages of $1,500 for a standard refrigerator and $500 for a chest freezer, we can project the potential retail revenue generated by the disaster:
- 109 Refrigerators x $1,500 = $163,500
- 191 Freezers x $500 = $95,500
- Total Projected Gross Revenue: $259,000
Because these appliances were ruined during a mandatory wildfire evacuation, virtually all of these replacements fall under the “Personal Property” coverage of standard B.C. home insurance policies.
This means insurance companies are injecting a quarter of a million dollars directly into the retail appliance sector to make these residents whole.
While the industry’s non-profit recycling arm absorbs a $45,000 cleanup bill, the manufacturing and retail side ultimately sees a massive surge in guaranteed, insurance-backed revenue.
Even after factoring in the cost of the cleanup, the industry walks away with over $214,000 in net retail revenue generated directly by the disaster.
To put that in perspective: For every $1 the industry spent cleaning up the disaster, they stand to make $4.75 in net retail revenue.
While MARR operates as a not-for-profit, the sheer volume of appliances sold in British Columbia means the agency manages a massive annual budget.
According to the organization’s recent financial disclosures, the agency routinely generates revenues that far exceed its immediate operational expenses.
The fiscal year for 2025 saw MARR report revenues exceeding $9-million, while its operational expenses hovered just over $6-million.
Under the strict rules governing provincial stewardship programs, this 3-million dollar surplus must be held by the non-profit in a legally mandated reserve fund to deal with catastrophic, unbudgeted contingencies. It is this exact multi-million-dollar reserve fund that is currently being deployed to cover the estimated $45,000 hazardous waste disposal costs happening in Clinton.
However, while MARR’s decision to cover the disaster disposal bill is a massive relief for the community, the power outage itself is unlikely to hurt the bottom line of the major appliance manufacturers that govern the agency.
With 300 appliances destroyed, residents will inevitably need to purchase replacements.
Based on local demographics, we’re going to adopt a ratio of 1.75 chest freezers for every 1 refrigerator lost in the region. Out of the 300 units collected, that breaks down to approximately 109 refrigerators and 191 freezers.
Using conservative retail averages of $1,500 for a standard refrigerator and $500 for a chest freezer, we can project the potential retail revenue generated by the disaster:
- 109 Refrigerators x $1,500 = $163,500
- 191 Freezers x $500 = $95,500
- Total Projected Gross Revenue: $259,000
Because these appliances were ruined during a mandatory wildfire evacuation, virtually all of these replacements fall under the “Personal Property” coverage of standard B.C. home insurance policies.
This means insurance companies are injecting a quarter of a million dollars directly into the retail appliance sector to make these residents whole.
While the industry’s non-profit recycling arm absorbs a $45,000 cleanup bill, the manufacturing and retail side ultimately sees a massive surge in guaranteed, insurance-backed revenue.
Even after factoring in the cost of the cleanup, the industry walks away with over $214,000 in net retail revenue generated directly by the disaster.
To put that in perspective: For every $1 the industry spent cleaning up the disaster, they stand to make $4.75 in net retail revenue.
While the Extended Producer Responsibility laws governing appliances saved Clinton taxpayers money, other provincial regulations are actively hindering disaster recovery elsewhere in B.C.
When the Village of Lytton burned down in 2021, the rebuilding effort triggered the provincial Heritage Conservation Act because the entire village sits on a site of immense archaeological significance to the Nlaka’pamux Nation.
The Act provides automatic legal protection to specific types of Indigenous sites, including any physical evidence of human habitation prior to 1846.
If a developer or homeowner wants to alter land that contains one of these protected sites, they are legally required to hire an archaeologist to conduct an assessment and apply for a permit.
When individual Lytton homeowners applied for building permits to dig their new foundations and utility trenches, they were legally required to hire archaeological monitors.
Residents received quotes ranging from $20,000 to $86,000 just to have monitors stand on their property while the digging occurred.
The massive financial hurdle is exacerbated by the fact that private home insurance policies do not cover archaeological assessments or monitoring.
Insurance covers the physical rebuilding of the structure, but not the regulatory costs of heritage compliance.
Because insurance wouldn’t touch it, those massive bills had to be paid out-of-pocket by the fire victims.
It caused such a financial bottleneck that many residents simply abandoned their rebuilding plans, while others were forced to drain their “contents insurance” — money meant to buy new furniture — just to pay the archaeologists.
