Addressing Refrigerants Makes Companies Leaders in the Climate Fight

Nick Cade

Refrigerants are central to many business activities: air conditioners cool office buildings, refrigerators and walk-in coolers chill food in supermarkets, and refrigerated trucks keep medicines safe during transport. In fact, most enterprises have large volumes of refrigerant deployed throughout their operations.

While refrigerants serve valuable purposes in commercial and industrial settings, many companies are unaware that they are harmful, potent greenhouse gases (GHG) and some are also ozone depleting substances (ODS). Businesses that care about the environment and seek to reduce emissions often overlook refrigerant when auditing their facilities, calculating emissions, or setting sustainability goals.

This will need to change if we want to make a dent in the fight against catastrophic climate change. The good news is that addressing refrigerants is not only environmentally responsible—it can also be a smart business decision for companies. A sustainability plan that includes responsible refrigerant management will help businesses convert equipment in a way that anticipates new changes to refrigerant regulation and avoids the resulting escalation in refrigerant prices.

What is the scale of the refrigerant management problem?

According to recent research from MIT, harmful old chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerants in use or stockpiled around the world equal roughly 9 billion tons of CO2.  If released, that is greater than the annual emissions of the United States, which totaled 6.6 billion metric tons of CO2e in 2019.

While new production of these refrigerants has been banned, large volumes still exist in older systems and pose an immediate threat to our environment. Preventing the release of these harmful refrigerants has been ranked as one of the single most effective actions we can take to mitigate catastrophic climate change. And without affirmative action, these gases will find their way into the atmosphere.

Where do companies find refrigerant?

Companies that maintain climate-controlled spaces or run operations that require cooling or industrial refrigeration are obvious owners of large amounts of refrigerant. The more buildings or facilities that you own and operate, the more refrigerant you are likely to have under management. Even simply maintaining a fleet of vehicles that have air conditioning systems will put a business in control of significant volumes of potential refrigerant emissions.

Yet no environmental regulatory bodies currently require companies to publish data on all refrigerant types that may be housed in their facilities. This means that many businesses do not maintain a complete inventory of their refrigerants. As such, they are often unaware of the acute climate risk posed by their own refrigerants – a risk squarely under their control.

How can organizations address refrigerants?

Businesses looking to be leaders in the fight against catastrophic climate change should embrace refrigerant management as a key component of their sustainability approach.

This is where we can help. Tradewater’s Catalytic Coalition is made up of leading businesses that are taking responsible action to mitigate the risk posed by their refrigerants. Our Coalition is supported by a highly experienced team of strategists, technicians, and engineers. Our team partners with businesses to develop customized and cost-effective plans to responsibly manage their refrigerants.

These plans begin with an actual inventory of all the refrigerants that an enterprise owns, identifying not just the total volume of refrigerant in their possession but also the potential emissions associated with different refrigerant types. We then create strategies to manage those refrigerants, accelerate conversions to alternatives with lower global warming potentials, and identify responsible end-of-life solutions for used or old refrigerants.

Ultimately, addressing refrigerants is good for the environment and smart business. Moreover, as industry leaders, participating companies have the opportunity to catalyze broader awareness of the climate threat posed by refrigerants by demonstrating their commitment to responsible refrigerant management.

To hear about the collective impact we can have through the Catalytic Coalition, you can view our recent webinar with Project Drawdown, MIT, and Intuit. To learn more about whether the Catalytic Coalition might be right for your business, please contact program director Nick Cade.

 

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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.