In England and Wales, a quiet infrastructure failure has collided with a warming climate to produce a crisis of the mundane: broken refrigerators, the ordinary detritus of modern life, have nowhere to go. Three of the ten plants capable of safely dismantling these appliances have closed in a single year, and the heat waves of 2026 have rendered the remaining seven intermittently inoperable, leaving twenty-six councils unable to collect what their residents can no longer use. It is a parable of compounding fragility — a system that appeared adequate until the moment it was needed most.