PLANS to store thousands of fridges in a secret location for the next year have been announced by council chiefs.

The proposals were made after new European laws made it necessary to remove environmentally-damaging chloro-fluorocarbons before disposing of fridges. But no company in this country has yet been found to carry out the work.

City of York Council is anticipating that 9,000 redundant fridges will have to be kept somewhere before the necessary work can be done.

Councillor Derek Smallwood, the authority's executive member for the environment, told a full council meeting: "There isn't a company yet that can deal with them, so we need to store them for something like 12 months. We are anticipating about 9,000 fridges."

And he admitted: "The prospect of siting 9,000 fridges somewhere is inevitably going to be a blot on somebody's landscape."

But Coun Smallwood said prospective sites could not be revealed.

He said: "It is confidential information because negotiations are on-going between storers of the fridges and this authority."