This summer alone, 26 local authorities in the UK had to stop accepting fridges and freezers for recycling. Now the appliances are piling up around the country – with no proper disposal date in sight

Not much is happening in the tiny Norfolk hamlet of Little Hautbois on the day I visit. The pub, once popular with airmen from RAF Coltishall, stopped being a pub a long time ago, even before RAF Coltishall stopped being RAF Coltishall. It’s not Saturday, so there are no weddings at Hautbois Hall. Nor is it 19 May, so the restless, headless ghost of Thomas Boleyn isn’t driving his carriage across the bridge over the River Bure, as he is said to do on the anniversary of the execution of his daughter, Anne. Today, a lovely autumn one, all is as it should be.

But half a mile down a narrow country lane is an incongruous and baffling sight: a strip of gentle hillside made up of large white rectangular blocks, piled up and sparkling in the sunshine. A glacier, you might think, if you were in Norway rather than Norfolk. (And ice is involved, as it happens.) As you get nearer, the picture becomes clearer; the blocks have coils on one face, doors and handles on the opposite one, plus the manufacturers’ names. It’s a glacier of fridges, more than 3,000 of them.