For the West Rockhill Elementary fifth-graders, the best part of their field trip was seeing an old refrigerator sawed in pieces.

At least, that's what stuck out in 10-year-old Tucker Chaikin's mind.

"It was cool how they chop the refrigerators in half," he said.

It wasn't the grand finale of a magic show, but Tucker and other students were awed and amazed this morning by how workers at JACO Environmental in Hatfield Township "demanufacture" appliances for recycling.

The Montgomery County recycling facility has been open for a year and is partnered with utilities such as PPL, Peco and MetEd in a statewide energy savings campaign.

JACO celebrated its first anniversary by inviting West Rockhill students to don safety glasses to tour its operations and see two old refrigerators from their school being recycled.

The elementary school's appliances stood out in the spacious warehouse filled with avocado, beige and white fridges. That's because the fifth-graders had previously signed their names in a rainbow of ink on the refrigerators, scrawling eco-friendly slogans, such as "Go green," "Go PPL. We rock," and "Save the earth. It's the only one we have."

JACO is able to recycle about 95 percent of the materials that make up old refrigerators, according to Michael Dunham, director of energy and environmental programs at JACO.

Workers begin the process by removing the door, shelves and drawers of the fridges.

The tempered glass shelves are crushed and shipped to a glass recycler. The glass is typically used as an aggregate material in concrete because it is tempered and melts at a higher temperature and thus cannot be mixed with the regular glass waste stream, Dunham said.

The stripped appliances are loaded onto a conveyor belt where they are tilted to drain refrigerant and oils. The capacitors are removed and if not suspected of containing hazardous materials are recycled.

JACO employees then cut the fridge into multiple pieces, separating the metal, plastic and foam. The metal and plastic are each compressed into 1,000-pound bales for shipping.

Plastic from fridges can be melted down and made into new computers and cell phones, Dunham said.

The metal often becomes construction rebar used to reinforce roads and buildings.

"You might be driving over parts of your old refrigerator that was recycled in this plant," Dunham said.

The polyurethane foam insulation is bagged and shipped to "waste-to-energy" incinerators for safe destruction.

The 10 pounds of foam in each old refrigerator contains about 1 pound of CFC-11, a harmful chlorofluorocarbon gas used as a blowing agent in fridges from the 1960s to the early 1990s.

Dunham calls CFC-11 and the refrigerant Freon "environmental time bombs" that need to be safely disposed of so they don't seep into the atmosphere.

It takes about half an hour for one JACO employee to take apart a refrigerator. The facility also demanufactures freezers and window air-conditioning units.

Dunham estimates that the Hatfield Township plant works on 1,000 fridges a week.

In the past year, customers of three major Pennsylvania electric utilities - PPL, Peco and MetEd - have recycled 50,000 older refrigerators, saving about 85,000 megawatt hours of electricity.

That's enough energy to power about 7,000 homes for a year, said Lissette Santana, a PPL spokeswoman.

In the average household, getting rid of the older, inefficient refrigerator - the one perhaps relegated to beverage duty in the garage or basement - could save as much as $150 a year in electricity costs, according to Santana.

JACO has 24 recycling facilities throughout the United States. Last year, the company recycled a total of 1.25 million appliances.

Though the disconnected and dismantled refrigerators filling the Hatfield Township plant are no longer fit to store a lunchbox, they still provided food for thought for West Rockhill students.

"My mom has an old refrigerator, and I think I might have her recycle it," said Jasmine Kratz, 11.