Compiled by Patrick Avenell

Current.com.au Tuesday visited the Panasonic Eco Technology Center (PETEC), a recycling plant where end-of-use, abandoned and obsolete TVs, laundry appliances, refrigerators and air conditioners are broken down into scrap parts to be onsold to manufacturers of new products. Here is a look at the amazing scenes we saw.

PETEC workers manually strip CRTs of their chassis before they are totally dismantled later down the line.

It's not all Panasonic electronics: here is a Toshiba TV being stripped. PETEC is funded by a Japanese Government scheme that compels consumers to pay for this recycling.

Washing machines and dryers on their way to be totally crushed.

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The PETEC Crushing Machine turns these appliances into pieces of metal the size of 5 cents coins.

Air conditioners are particularly hard to recycle as they contain compressors which must be handled differently.

A lone PETEC worker manually dismantling an air conditioner compressor.

Apologies for the poor image quality: this is the best shot we could get of a full size refrigerator being crushed by a door swinging it into interlocking, grinding jaws.

An insight into the enormous scope of this operation: these are crates of washing machines being prepped for crusing. The man in the forklift provides a scale for the size of these crates, which is foreshortened by the camera angle.