Remembering our Common Goal: Saving the Planet

Valeria Rios-Maldonado

We’ve all seen the recent headlines about the consumer class action lawsuit filed against Delta Airlines and the misrepresentation of their carbon-neutral claims. Not long before that, we saw news coming out of the European Parliament around greenwashing, subsequently leading to a push for a ban on businesses’ carbon neutrality claims.

One might think that as someone who works for a carbon offset project developer, these headlines would upset me, but what I truly come out feeling is disappointment. 

It is no news to us that not all carbon offsets are created equally, but this does not mean that they do not each have a role to play in the fight against climate change. They won’t be able to play that role, however, without increased honesty and transparency.

Earlier this year, our COO released a statement talking about the important role carbon credits play in the fight against climate change, and Tradewater’s efforts to bring young people into the fight to tackle non-CO2 gases.  

I happen to be one of those young professionals who left my graduate program looking for a way to fight climate change head-on. I knew when I was looking for jobs that I wanted to be on the ground doing something tangible. Something I could quite literally, physically do. 

And boy, did it get physical! 

I started at Tradewater in January 2020 and in those first two- and- a-half months, I traveled across over seven different states collecting and transporting thousands of pounds of refrigerant. There are so many procedures, policies, and regulations at play in the work we do, from the type of material we can buy to how it’s collected and transported. It’s a lot of information to absorb, let alone to ensure we’re putting it into practice. 

Yet, I had the chance to learn the most from the individuals we purchased material from. I listened to their stories about how they obtained this material and why they still held onto it after all these years. They’d talk to me about the cars they used their R-12 refrigerant on and how it differed from newer alternatives on the market. It became evident to me that not everyone embraced the shift towards lower global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants. 

However, they found an opportunity and incentive through companies like ours to sell their old stock. It seemed that despite our differing objectives, we managed to find a middle ground that resulted in a net good. 

This all added a human element to the work I was doing, and solidified my feeling that it was real—real in that beyond the ramifications of climate change, it had a very tangible effect on the individuals we are working with and the communities they service. As my role at Tradewater has evolved, it’s become even clearer that there is a crucial need for a company like ours to provide a financial incentive for individuals, companies, and communities to properly retire this material. 

All of us here at Tradewater share the frustrations that are bubbling up about the ways in which we talk about and market carbon offsets. We welcome the valid scrutiny of the work that we do and will continue to be transparent and push for others in this industry to do the same. It is especially important in this day and age to scrutinize the media we consume and ask for accountability from those that have proven to purposely mislead the public.

The passion we feel for this work is palpable, and only further bolstered by the tangible change we see ourselves making every time we send out our next shipment. Our work here at Tradewater truly is a team effort, and I feel fortunate to have found my way into this unique corner of the climate movement. It is my hope that as we continue to hold each other accountable, we do not lose sight that we are all working towards a common goal: a more sustainable future for all.  

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Permanence

Emission reductions are considered permanent if they are not reversible. In some projects, such as forestry or soil preservation, carbon offset credits are issued based upon the volume of CO2 that will be sequestered over future decades—but human actions and natural processes such as forest fires, disease, and soil tillage can disrupt those projects. When that happens, the emission reductions claimed by the project are reversed.

The destruction of halocarbon does not carry this risk. All destruction activities in Tradewater’s projects are conducted pursuant to the Montreal Protocol , which requires “a destruction process” that “results in the permanent transformation, or decomposition of all or a significant portion of such substances.” Specifically, the destruction facilities Tradewater uses must meet or exceed the recommendations of the UN Technology & Economic Assessment Panel , which approves certain technologies to destroy halocarbons, including the requirement that the technology achieve a 99.99% or higher “destruction and removal efficiency.” Simply put, this means that Tradewater’s technologies ensure that over 99.99% of the chemicals are permanently destroyed. During the destruction process, a continuous emission monitoring system is used to ensure full destruction of the ODS collected.

Accuracy

Some carbon offset projects necessarily rely on estimations or assumptions when calculating the emission reductions from project activities. Forestry projects, where developers make assumptions about the carbon that will be sequestered over future decades if trees are conserved, are a perfect example. Such projects sometimes result in an overestimation of the environmental benefit of the project.

Tradewater’s halocarbon projects avoid the issue of overestimation by consistently conducting extremely precise testing and measurement of the amount of refrigerant destroyed in each project.

  • Every container of ODS that Tradewater destroys is weighed by a third-party using regularly calibrated scales. The ODS is then sampled by a third-party and analyzed by an accredited refrigerant laboratory to determine its species and purity. These two steps combine to ensure that credits are issued only for the precise volume and type of refrigerant destroyed.
  • The destruction facilities that Tradewater uses continuously monitor the incineration process during destruction events to ensure that over 99.99% of the ODS is destroyed. This monitoring is mandated by regulatory protocols and is part of the verification process to which projects are subjected.
  • Tradewater accounts for the project emissions created during the collection, transport, and destruction of ODS, and the number of offsets issued is reduced by a corresponding amount. The protocols that we use also build in other reductions to account for substitute chemicals that will be used to replace the destroyed refrigerants. Tradewater publishes this information in the documentation for all its ODS destruction projects. These documents outline how the material was obtained, the project emissions calculations, the test results, and the amount and type of ODS chemicals destroyed, among other information.

    • Additionality

    It is a basic requirement of all carbon offset projects that the underlying project activities are additional. “Additional” means that the projects would not happen in the absence of a carbon market. Tradewater’s halocarbon projects simply would not happen – and the gases would be left to escape into the atmosphere – without the sale of the resulting carbon offset credits. This is because there is no mandate to collect and destroy these gases. It is still permissible to buy, sell, and use halocarbons that were produced before the ban. There are other reasons halocarbon destruction projects are additional:

    • There are no incentives or financial mechanisms to encourage halocarbon destruction. According to the International Energy Agency and United Nations Environment Program, “there is rarely funding nor incentive” to recover and destroy ozone depleting substances in storage tanks and discarded equipment. And collecting, transporting, and destroying halocarbons is time-intensive and expensive. The burden to collect and destroy these gases therefore remains prohibitive outside of carbon offset markets—meaning that if organizations like Tradewater do not do this work, nobody else will.
    • Countries are not focused on the need to collect and destroy halocarbons. The Montreal Protocol has been celebrated as a success because of its production ban. This success, however, ignores the legacy gases produced before the ban and is a blind spot for government regulators. In the U.S., for example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) developed a Vintaging Model in the 1990s to estimate the quantify of ozone depleting substances left in circulation. Based on the inputs and assumptions put into the model, the EPA predicted that no CFCs would be available for recovery beyond 2020 in the United States. But this prediction did not prove accurate. Tradewater has collected and destroyed more than 1.5 million pounds of CFCs globally in recent years and continues to identify thousands of pounds per week.
    • International carbon accounting standards do not require corporations to measure or track emissions tied to halocarbons, and refrigerants are specifically excluded from Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) commitments. These commitments derive from emissions reporting under the GHG Protocol, which requires companies to report on emissions only from new generation refrigerants, such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), but does not establish any obligation to report inventories or emissions of refrigerants still in use, such as CFCs and HCFCs. All these factors combine to make Tradewater’s carbon offset projects highly additional. As Giving Green, an initiative of IDinsight, concluded: “Tradewater would not exist without the offset market, so this element of additionality is clearly achieved.” The case for additionality is not so clear for some other project types, such as forestry and landfill gas carbon projects. For example, some forests are already being conserved for their beauty, or for use as parks, and generate carbon offset credits only because those conservation efforts do not yet have full formal protection in place to avoid deforestation in the future. Similarly, methane from landfills can be used to make electricity or captured as compressed natural gas, thereby creating additional revenue streams to support the activities, beyond the sale of carbon credits.