When shopping for refrigerators, make sure you look at the actual kilowatts used, instead of just the energy star rating. The energy star rating is calculated based on models of similar size and design. You may find that a non-energy star refrigerator in the standard design uses much less electricity than a side by side energy star refrigerator.

The average UK home is also much smaller than the average North American home.  Somehow, the Brits, for the most part, manage to get along just fine without laundry,dog grooming, scrapbooking or gift wrapping rooms. (Or atleast they did when the majority of their homes were built) Amazing.  Though the cupboard size fridge does not necessarily represent an energy savings, to me it represents something far deeper and more important to eco-attitudes: an ideology.  Specifcially, the urge and desire obviously prevalent in North America to over-consume, the sense of entitlement to lots of personal space and the complete refusal to accept that sustainable development may mean giving up shoddily built 5 bedroom, 3 car garage homes.  (Though from the news of a second downstairs fridge I'm worried the "give me my acre" attitude is spreading more rapidly than I am comfortable with)

Living in Europe I do realise that most things are smaller here.
There are many reasons:
Energy costs a lot more. For example, one gallon of gasoline will cost at least 7 dollars. Of course cars are smaller.                         The same is the case with fridges. I just had a look at the local store. Energy efficiency is classified in A, B and C. American fridges always come in class C.
8 fridges had the height of 88 cm, 2 came with 122 cm and only one with  178 cm.
Then the basic difference is our eating habits.
It depends on where you live in Europe, but generally we eat more fresh food and less industrial products- it's normal to go to the local market to buy food for just one meal and cook it at home.  But definitely times are changing. Many people try to adopt the "American way of live". This means more instant or frozen food which needs cooling. Greentrain you're right, I'm also worried.

When on my honeymoon in New Zealand I noticed they all had very small fridges.  They also didn't keep a everything in the fridge that us Americans do. They never put eggs in the fridge! I think they also do not buy a lot of frozen/pre-prepared foods. Kiwis are very eco-consious.  It was very inspiring.  Where can I find a half-flush toilet??? :)

Americans "need" larger fridges for the same reason we "need" large cars: because we like to have whatever we want at our immediate disposal (pun intended).  In places where there are stores within walking distance, one has the slight inconvenience of having to leave one's abode to procure the delights of the world, and must bear the risk that the store might be out (heaven forbid!).  Americans and those seeking to emulate us prefer to bring the offerings of the world home, where they can be more easily stockpiled (hoarded), monitored, and controlled.  Note the "home gym" phenomenon, the "home cappucino bar" phenomenon, the "home entertainment megacomplex" phenomenon, etc etc etc.

Now, I would absolutely LOVE to have a house with all those things.  But I would love it more to have those things be accessible to me and everyone else via a short walk or public transit ride!  I might just get some exercise and make an unexpected acquaintance in the process of meeting my daily [cappucino] "needs".  Malthus would be proud.

I imagine the lifestyle of an urban European would differ from a rural one. When I lived in Chicago I hardly put anything in my fridge because the grocery store was just a block away.

Now that I'm in the vast expanse of exurbia I have two full-size fridges that are filled up.

Not everyone with a large refrigerator and a freezer lives within walking distance of local markets.

My "local" quality food venues are Trader Joe's (10 miles away), some small selections at Albertson's (3 miles away) and a small market (3 miles away). The market is closest but it is two miles away. With 100° temperatures in the summer and an hour or more wait between urine-scented buses, there isn't much choice here. I'd have to take 2 buses to get to the store and 2 more back for a cost of about $3. It is impractical to get to these places more than once a week. Often its twice a month that we do our shopping for a family of 5. I could walk the hour or so each way but wouldn't be able to get anything that needed to be kept refrigerated. I am physically unable to ride a bicycle and while I do walk when I can it is often excruciatingly painful. The nearest store is a Walmart Supercenter, and yes if absolutely necessary then I will walk and shop there but prefer not to.

Not everyone lives in a large city with every amenity around the corner to make a smaller fridge worthwhile. Instead I go for the most efficient models that I can, reduce my usage in other ways like leaving the AC off all day, working from home, changing lightbulbs, driving a small but efficient car as little as possible and so forth.

Having lived with everything from small box refrigerators in a dorm to an average-sized new refrigerator in the condo we recently bought, I must confess that large refrigerators seem to keep food colder.  This is because they recover faster after one opens the door.

It's true, shopping in European rural areas without car turns out to be more difficult than a few years ago. Our small grocery closed down this year, there's still one left in walking distance but who knows how long. Even in small towns shops have to close because supermarkets at the outskirts are so much "cheaper", but actually the price is high because you need a car to get there. There is a system behind these developments. The EU tries to do everything to let the small ones (farmers...) die so the big ones will make the cash.
Still, for a family of five we just need a 88 cm fridge.

... go to the grocery store/various markets much more often than we do, for the most part. I go maybe once a week or so, they go almost daily. Many of them live closer to markets, which is nice, but for me to have a small fridge would require a drive of (at minimum) a mile round trip each day to get to the dirty expensive store I never shop at.
The market we actually shop at is about 7 miles away, so a 14 mile round trip would use about a gallon of gas every day and a half in my car (about 24 MPG for my car)
I can't imagine my comparatively massive new fridge being worse than all that gas.
My old fridge bit the dust last year & could not be resurrected.  When we started looking for a new one, the paperwork said that it used X amount of energy (expressed in kWh a year). I worked it out to cost under $50.00 a year in electricity - iirc, around $48.00 or so. My car using an extra gallon every day-and-a-half works out to 20 gallons of fuel a month extra. At $3.00 a gallon (conservative figure, because gas is actually closer to $3.20), that is $60.00 a month and $720.00 a year.
Public transport isn't possible where I live, so I can't consider that (even though I live in the center of town, the bus system is unreliable, expensive & slow).
So, $720.00 dollars (plus tires, wear, tear, pollution, time, my energy, etc) in order to not own a big fridge that costs less than $50.00 a year to own doesn't make economic sense to me.
Unless people in the US are willing to radically change urban planning to include better buses & other public transport methods, more centralized amenities, my new fridge will probably remain a better choice. It isn't as simple as "smaller fridge = better", at least not for our family.

Correct me if I'm wrong: another thing I've noticed with our American acquaintances is that, like sarahbei says, they keep everything they might possibly need in a week and much more at hand in their fridge, and therefore most of it spoils and gets thrown out. Hardly any of my European friends do this and it just seems mind-boggling to me. In our household things go bad maybe once or twice a year? And when we're forced to throw it away (=usually compost) I always feel really bad and guilty for ages. I guess we manage it with a bit of forward planning.

Mind you, they are starting to sell "American fridges" here in Finland, too, and they're about 1.5-2 times the size of an ordinary fridge (not many people here, either, use the squat ones).

While our friends down under may have smaller fridges into which they put less, they also irradiate perishables because of the reality of their location.  You can find dairy and eggs that can sit on the shelf indefinitely because they may very well have to before someone can buy it.  Leaving North American eggs out of the fridge to conserve energy is a well tested recipe for food poisoning.

mayonnaise, in the jar, is too acidic to spoil. Only when it is mixed with foods does mayonnaise transform into the Slime of Death.

Possibly.  But everyone knows after the first scoop of mayo is used, the jar gets smearing of tuna salad inside it.

Greentrain, especially, leans on a few too many of the common stereotypes that many have in mind when describing the common American household.  Humorous though it may be to refer to gift wrapping rooms, there are millions of us who grew up in relatively small homes.  The large refrigerator my family had was certainly not very energy efficient, but we USED it.  We prepared a lot of food that subsequently had to be refrigerated.  We went out of our way to find the most energy-efficient fridge on the market when we needed a new one.  

In addition to this, one must indeed admit that many Americans do not live a hop, skip, and a jump away from a farmers or supermarket.  Using a large refrigerator wisely is indeed necessary for many.  

Now that I live in SW Germany, I of course know many people with small refrigerators.  I find the small fridge at my mother-in-law's house almost maddeningly small, and she rarely has anything around that is worth eating!  (And, as in quite a few German households, she also has a huge "Kühltruhe" [freezer or icebox] in her basement, something I would not say is widespread -- though perhaps common -- in many American households.)

I actually do not believe that "many if not most" Europeans have different (meaning "better" or more eco-friendly) grocery shopping patterns/habits.  Many do shop for food differently than millions in the U.S., but the discussion is much more complex than the typical "Europe-America" focus that many of us fall back on.  It depends on the area and the person.  

We live near and know many people -- many more than one would like to admit around here -- who drive to grocery stores, even if they are relatively close by.  Indeed, these are also often the stores I am reluctant to enter: Penny, Lidl, Aldi, Plus... It is actually fairly sad what is happening to the German retail landscape in some regions, but I see many around here wasting lots of fuel on what I would call unnecessary shopping trips...something I witnessed in America all the time.  Class and education are much more important to this discussion than "America" and "Europe"!  That being said, what I really admire about how things work here in Germany is that information about where/how/why/when to purchase such environmentally-friendly devices is easy to come by.  The state, at the local and national scale, is in many cases more of an active participant in the movement to help consumers reduce their carbon footprint.  This is something that I missed growing up in the States, at least to the extent that I see it here.

I lived in Oz for several years, and no one and no store refrigerated their eggs. We had our own chickens and never refrigerated the eggs. Egg farmers and retailers gave me a good reason. In Australia eggs are not scrubbed clean before they are packed, as they are in the USA. Hence, American eggs actually lose their natural protection and therefore need to be refrigerated. No one ever mentioned irradiation, which is still not widely accepted in Oz as far as I know.

I don't know how much food outside the US is irradiated, but I have read that factory farming (which is largely how food is produced in the US) increases the odds that food like meat or eggs has harmful bacteria in them from the start.
I would never leave eggs out - I have seen too many cases of food poisoning. I say this in spite of owning one of those old wire egg baskets -mine is now decorative. Just a generation or two ago in the US, people regularly left eggs out on the counter in these baskets.

The picture at the top of this article shows a tomato in a refrigerator.  Don't refrigerate tomatoes, it destroys their flavor and texture.  It seems that we've developed a mindset; when in doubt, refrigerate.  

SJ  

"All uncanned animals and their products need to be refrigerated."

Yet another reason to start eating more mealess meals!

The reason salmonella poisoning is increasing in the U.S. is because of intensification of egg producing facilities. Does is really shock people that the worse you treat animals, the more often their products will be contaminated? Eggs used to come from hens out in the barn yard. Now they mostly come from factory farms, where hens are kept beak to beak in tiny battery cages with not even enough space to spread their wings.  Consider the many egg alternatives available when baking or scrambling. At the very least, switch to free-range, local eggs.

Oops, should be:

Yet another reason to start eating more meatless meals!

Fertilized eggs are living beings and stay alive for weeks until the hen decides to start breeding. They are still edible after a few weeks in the nest.(we tried it - believe it or not)
Factory eggs are a different story. Just don't buy them.

Brits (and Europeans) have smaller fridges for practical as well as cultural reasons:
as pointed out, kitchens are smaller and designed for small fridges.
people don't shop for costco size/quantities of food for same reason.
milk, which is still drunk on a regular basis,is delivered to the doorstep in the UK every morning, so no need for a gallon size jug.
generally there is an aversion to very cold food and drink.  No one needs a huge area set aside for chilling six packs of beer because drinking an ice cold beer is seen as a peculiarly American taste (or lack thereof).  ditto for ice and ice makers.

Needless to say, the moment a Brit gets an addition on the house or moves up to one with an extra utility room or cellar, the first thing to go in that room would be an extra fridge or freezer.  I bet Hyacinth Bucket has a freezer tucked out of sight.

Would be to make refrigerators which connected to a unit outside the house like a central AC/Heat unit does..
At present , no matter how efficient the refrig is, that exhausted heat is put into the living space and must then be dealt with again by the Air Conditioner. :)

I recently went shopping for a fridge and had the thought to downsize.  After checking the energy star numbers, I found that there really wasn't a significant benefit to downsizing.

Then considering the fact that I would need to take more trips to the store, I decided against a smaller fridge.

It's kind of like a closet, if you have a small one, you think more carefully about what clothes you really wear, and get rid of the rest. If you have a big one, well, it'll soon be full of weird stuff.

I don't think it's about country vs. city access to supermarkets. It's more about prepared/packaged vs. raw/non-packaged food. Frozen pizzas take up space. My wife and I are in the country, with a Trader Joe's half an hour away, and a small market/farm stand 15 minutes away, yet we get by just fine with an intermediate "apartment sized" fridge of about 10 cubic ft (by Absocold, that uses about 300 watts, about a third less than the best full size fridge). We rarely fill it up, except for the crisper, and we cook every meal at home. My parents, on the other hand, somehow have two full-sized fridges, the main one more crammed than ours. The difference is my mother, knowing she has the room, buys lots of frozen things in boxes, multiple large OJ containers (I prefer frozen OJ), and more variants (3 kinds of bread?). We eat lots of fresh fruit that we don't refrigerate, and have a hybrid of Asian and Mediterranean diets based around vegetables, rice, pasta, with basically no packaging. Beyond that, it's a mystery, but we certainly eat well, and wouldn't want a bigger fridge if you gave us one.

Our medium sized Absocold uses 330kwh/yr, not 300 watts, as I said. Modern full size fridges (20 Cubic ft and up) seem to use between 450 and 550 kwh/yr, mostly.

The largest European fridge I found has about 12 cubic ft and needs 186 kwh/yr. The largest fridge/freezer-combination has 14 cubic ft and uses 296 kwh/yr. Probably you will find larger ones, if you look hard enough.

Its strange that this topic came up the day I took delivery of a brand new fridge freezer - to replace the nine month old machine which is seemingly the only one Bosch have ever made with a design fault (not that I'm annoyed at Bosch or anything).

Its perfectly true that most European fridges/fridge freezers are smaller than their US counterparts, but the trend in the UK is certainly towards larger units.  US sitcoms (apart from Friends - who have the classic Smeg look) always seem to have a massive fridge in their kitchen, etc - and having a US style machine is a bit like having a SUV - its a fashion statement as much as anything.

The one I've just taken delivery of seems huge.  Its 2m tall (even the Bosch was only 185cm high), and resembles a white version of the monolith from 2001 sitting in your kitchen.  The difference between US and European machines is partially one of layout - the US side by side machines are much wider, so they seem even bigger. But they are also bigger in terms of volume.  The store which sells my new machine (John Lewis) also sells US makes such as Maytag and Admiral.  The smallest machine  for either of those makes has a fridge size 40% bigger than mine (although admittedly for twice the price), and the Magtag Zigzag's is pretty much double.

Part of the reaon for that, as lama pointed out, is the size of US packaging.  My wife and I went to San Diego for our honeymoon, and went to the local supermarket to get a pint of milk.  The smallest we could get was 6 pints.  Thats the largest family sized pack you can get in the UK, and the rest of the cold section was similar.  Very big bottles, etc means very big fridges.  My cousin lives in SD, and as a single guy who travels on business a fair bit, he basically eats out, rather than buying a large amount of food which he will have to throw away - its simply cheaper and easier.

There are other reasons for smaller units in Europe as well, but certainly in the UK, the idea that we all go out to the market every day, have our milk delivered in pint bottles and ignore the supermarket is simply no longer true (hopefully the French and the Italians will hold on to this idea).  UK consumers normally now go once a week to a supermarket, load up (especially if there is a BOGOF going) and throw everything into the fridge/freezer (my new machine even has a special setting to cool down food just bought from the supermarket, alas).

And we do buy increasing amounts of ready meals, which we then put in the fridge, and often throw away at the end of the week, as well as pizzas, etc.

But most people here still buy the classic Euro model, with the fridge on top, although they are certainly getting taller.  We tend to go up because kitchens are generally smaller.  That design is also seemigly  more efficient than a side by side (although the Maytags, etc that JL seems to sell are all A rate). Euro models also never seem to have the ice cube makers which must really  burn power.

I suspect that a lot of the difference is lifestyle - I certainly dont think that my cousin has a large fridge, although it would be rather cheaper for him to buy one in the US - he simply does not need one.

I also suspect that manufacturers produce what they think the market wants - if your used to a big unit, then thats what you'll tend to buy - most of us dont shop just on price or energy efficiency alone.

I am surprised though by the fact that all my North American relatives still use top loading washing machines - something which I havn't seen for years here.  Front loaders are easier to load and more efficient with water, yet on Pricerunner, about 60% of the machines are still toploaders.  Again, the size and design of machines probably has as much to do with culture and tradition as anything else.

The US saw a mid-20th century move out from the city, highways and tract homes were built, made attractive and affordable.  Aside from the multiple reasons these highways were built, both idealistic and greedy, the effect of these highways and tract homes is that now too large part of the American population are trapped in suburbs.  No sidewalks, no grocery stores nearby.  Since people have to drive to shop, sometimes real distances it probably is lighter on the environment to have a larger fridge, , as pelagicrabbit said above.  To some extent, large fridges come from the way this country's planning has evolved.

If you do happen to have a larger fridge, do what you can to boost its efficiency.  Keep it clean, clean the door gaskets so it closes tightly.  If you have a second freezer, don't keep it in an unconditioned part of your house, like your garage.  Recycle it when it really has to go (some utilities will take old fridges.) Avoid side-by-sides, they use more power. Neither a borrower nor a lender be....oops, I got a little carried away.

I live in the Philadelphia metro area, where our summer climate often lands us with a home hovering around 84 degrees at 75 percent humidity (we don't have air conditioning and aren't planning to get it). We refrigerate a lot of stuff because nearly ANYTHING without preservatives will mold/spoil/wilt if left out. Also, while I am fine with beer that is not ice-cold, I can't say I like an 84 degree beer. In cooler times, we leave our beer out (also, bottle-conditioned and/or non-pasteurized beer definitely changes - not usually for the better - pretty quickly in a hot and humid climate).

Contrast this with the typical climate in the UK, which is often cool and cloudy and pretty much ideal for leaving many things out that I must refrigerate, such as beer, or butter, or cheese.

Larger families is another factor to consider. We live in the Philly burbs and have three children (which is pretty normal for our area) and I have several friends who have four to six children. In the 80s growing up I knew very few families that had more than two kids (high inflation and cost of living) and since the 90s family sizes seem to be increasing. The only thing is that the cost of living has increased as well while most incomes have not. So we are forced to buy in bulk for better pricing and make fewer trips to the store to save on the price of gas. With three boys in the house, I throw VERY little away and while my fridge may be full on the day I go shopping, it does not stay that way long. It is more cost effective and easier on the environment for me to have a bigger fridge than to make several trips to the store.

Pam - you raised a question that I find interesting.  If, as you say, the cost of living is rising but incomes are not, why are families getting bigger?  My mom has a cousin who just had her eighth (planned) child, and a local colleague and his wife just had their sixth (surprise, but the first 5 were planned).  To me, this sounds crazy!  Although, I do believe that it's better for children to be born to people who want them and have the resources to provide for them than people who don't have access to contraception and other options.  

Many Americans consider it mean-spirited to field less than a cornucopia for every meal, order less than three courses at a restaurant, or attend a potluck with less than enough to feed everyone there twice over. Doggie bags and leftovers cram the refrigerator, then are seldom touched until they're ritually sniffed, prodded and thrown out a week or so later. No self-respecting European leaves a restaurant clutching a bag of cold half-eaten food. Euggh! Enough!