Halon - Tradewater

Halon

Halons are potent greenhouse gases that cause climate change and deplete the ozone layer. They are a class of prohibited synthetic chemicals that were historically used as fire suppressants and in specialized industries such as aviation and data centers.

Why this Matters

They are potent: Halons are up to 6,290 times more potent than CO2.

They’re still used: It is now illegal to produce new halons, but existing stockpiles and recycled gas can still be used in old equipment. Current EPA regulations allow commercial recyclers to purchase halon, reclaim it to industry specifications, and sell it to buyers such as airlines, the military, and oil and gas companies.

When used, they will leak: Any equipment that still uses halons is at least thirty years old and invariably leaks. Moreover, if halons are needed to put out a fire, they are released quickly and completely, and can never be recovered from the atmosphere.

Safer technology exists: While newer, environmentally safer, fire suppressant technologies exist, users and industries have been slow to transition from legacy technologies.

The amount of halons left in the world, if released, would equal close to the total annual emissions for the entire state of California — about 300,000,000 tons of CO2e .

Our Solution

Tradewater is tackling this problem by collecting halons recovered from old systems and destroying them, permanently preventing these harmful materials from being reused and eventually released into the atmosphere.

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Tradewater’s Halon Projects meet and exceed the standards of the most robust protocols, resulting in the highest quality climate benefits.

The emission reductions are permanent: the halons we collect are destroyed—permanently and irreversibly.

The emission reductions are additional: there is no end-of-life solution for these halons—if we don’t do this work, no one else will.

The projects are verified: the climate benefits are rigorously audited by an independent third-party, and carbon offset credits are issued by the world’s leading carbon registries (including the ACR Registry).

The offset credits are innovative and impactful: This is a new and growing project type that convenes industry leaders to accelerate the responsible transition to new fire suppressant solutions.

Case Study

In 2022, Tradewater developed the world’s first halon gas destruction and carbon offset project, partnering with Iron Mountain and Wesco HMB to drive this responsible transition.

Source: Recovered the gas from old fire extinguishers.

Impact: Permanently prevented the release of 2,687 pounds of Halon 1301.

Offset: Generated 3,346 tons of carbon offset credits. The climate impact was verified by a third-party to ensure the destruction was safe and to validate the environmental benefit of the project.

For more information, click on the link to read the Press Release.

The smart choice for sustainable investing: carbon credits you can trust.

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Tradewater generates carbon offset credits by collecting and permanently destroying harmful greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the form of refrigerant gases through a safe, verifiable process. If not destroyed, these GHGs would eventually be released into the atmosphere.

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.