Unpacking the ‘Why’

How do we go faster? By that I mean how do we reduce emissions faster. Many years ago I started to explore this idea with the belief that concentrating on energy efficiency would move the needle. It has certainly helped but there gradually followed a realisation that there is another area that potentially carries an even greater opportunity – refrigeration and refrigerants.

There is a good reason that Project Drawdown puts Refrigerant Management so high on their list of Climate Solutions (you can read more about that here).

Many cooling and refrigeration systems (plus heat pumps) contain climate super-pollutants – refrigerants that have a global warming impact many times higher than CO2 - and even though long outlawed many still also have an Ozone depletion impact (example being R22 refrigerant).

These super pollutants should stay sealed in their respective units but they leak – a little in the manufacturing, some (in many cases a lot) during operation and some more during end-of-life dismantling and disposal. All this adds up to a climate impact that left unchecked could add another 0.4 degrees of global heating.

Frameworks such as the Kigali amendment are certainly helping with the phase-down (not phase-out) of these super pollutants. However, as the latest IPCC report makes clear - this is now a race against time – and even with Kigali there will be many countries that have decades before they need to take action and we now know that every fraction of a degree matters.

Keeping these super-pollutants from reaching the atmosphere is our focus. There are lots of ways to do this but we can boil it down to reducing the need (for cooling energy), containing the refrigerants (through inventory management, leak detection and training) and choosing the right retrofit or replacement paths (using non-fluorinated alternative refrigerants).

We mustn’t however sacrifice efforts to address energy related CO2 in our quest for managing refrigerants. Refrigerants have a short-term warming impact while CO2 remains around for a long time.

So in short we need to address both and by doing so we can achieve a greater impact than focussing on either area in isolation.

This is the why – we believe that refrigeration selection and containment efforts coupled with energy efficiency efforts (including great design) are key steps to arriving at the desired result.

To quote Project Drawdown’s work – “Parallel action is requisite – we need to address refrigerants coming out of use, as well as transitioning those coming in”.

Unlike some in the industry we are not here to sell synthetic chemicals or cooling equipment. There is often confusion created by those with vested interests which is why we believe it is important to work as independents.

There is an enormous amount to explore in this area and we’ll do our best to distil what we think is most relevant and critical to action. We look forward to sharing the journey.