I'm a bit skeptical about them actually being recycled though. How many of the appliances are recyclable? What parts of them are vs what ends up in the dump? Everything I've heard - and admittedly I haven't looked too deep - is that recycling is mostly a sham and mostly just ends up as waste either here or shipped overseas for someone else to deal with.
Plastic and glass recycling is often a sham, because both things are usually of little value -- sometimes, even of negative value.
A pile of plastic is mostly just a liability, with a strong likelihood of it ultimately being dumped or landfilled somewhere in the world.
But metal recycling is real. Unlike plastic and glass, metal has positive value. There is an entire profitable industry that exists to recycle metal -- including appliances. We've been recycling metals for as long as we have mined their ores from the Earth.
A pile of washing machines is an asset. It has real value. It doesn't get landfilled or dumped -- it gets sold.
I would expect appliances to be fairly recyclable. They're mostly made of metal, which can be sold for scrap. Parts can be stripped out and sold to appliance repair shops.
Plus, appliances with refrigerants need special handling to prevent the release of the refrigerants to the atmosphere -- better to have one organization handling that than leaving citizens to their own devices.
