In The Media

Highlighting Tradewater: news, articles, events, and podcasts featuring our global efforts to reduce potent greenhouse gas emissions.

This team races to destroy superheating gases

TDC (2024)

Check out this video from TDC for a quick look at what makes Tradewater tick, illustrating the challenges and intricacies of our work.

Tim Brown Interview - WDHT COP28

Climate Hub (2023)

Watch our CEO and co-founder Tim Brown at We Don’t Have Time, The Climate Hub broadcast at COP28. He talked to the WDHT team about the urgent climate solutions we need to implement at scale today to pull the emergency brake on catastrophic climate change.

The Fashion Industry’s Focus on Short-Lived Climate Pollutants

Green Story (2023)

Watch as Akhil Sivanandan from Green Story and Jenny Morgan from Tradewater delve into an engaging and insightful discussion on “The Fashion Industry’s Focus on Short-Lived Climate Pollutants.” This webinar explores the vital role the fashion industry plays in addressing climate change, particularly through the lens of short-lived climate pollutants.
WATCH HERE

Cancel Culture in Climate - October First Thursday

The Sustainability Alliance (2023)

Companies that are self-nominating themselves as “green” and “sustainable” are receiving an enormous amount of scrutiny. Organizations that are purchasing carbon credits are experiences even more negative attention due to accusations of double counting, lack of transparency, and allowing for continued pollution. Rather than cancelling these organizations all together and forcing them into hiding, let’s examine cancel culture in the climate space, the benefits of funding climate projects, and how individuals like us can collectively influence global climate action.
WATCH HERE

Offsets - Dangerous Diversion or Essential Tool

Climate Optimists (2023)

Listen to Tradewater’s Market Development Manager, Jenny Morgan, on episode 78 of the Climate Optimists Podcast, titled “Offsets- Dangerous Diversion or Essential Tool”, where she’ll talk about carbon credits, how they work and why they are crucial in the fight against climate change.
LISTEN HERE

Ways to Save the Planet: Fridge Detectives

BBC (2021)

Learn why they call us the “Fridge Detectives,” on this episode of BBC’s podcast, People Fixing the World.
LISTEN HERE

Why Refrigerators Are So Hard To Recycle

Business Insider (2021) 
In this episode of Business Insider’s “World Wide Waste,” we follow Ecologia Total’s Angel Toledo, who, with the support of Tradewater, embarks on the difficult task of managing refrigerant gas from scrapped fridges.

Hunt for the Red Canister: Climate Killing Gas Worth Searching For

Daily Sabah (2021)
Learn how we seek out refrigerants gases and what we do once we have them.
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The Best Climate Solution You've Never Heard Of

BBC (2021)
Follow our partner Angel Toledo around Guatemala City as he uncovers hidden refrigerant gases to destroy.
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Sell Me Your Climate Bombs

NPR’s Planet Money (2020)
Find out what we do to stop climate bombs from exploding on this episode of the “Planet Money” podcast.
LISTEN HERE

One Overlooked Way to Fight Climate Change? Dispose of Old CFCs

National Geographic (2019)
Explore our first international project from 2017 in Ghana. We collected and destroyed 15,000 kg of CFC-12 through two projects, resulting in the issuance of more than 150,000 tons of carbon offset credits. 
READ HERE

Tradewater's Overview by Giving Green

Giving Green, an initiative that studies and recommends various environmentally focused projects, gave Tradewater the stamp of approval by adding us to the list of organizations worthy of support.
Giving Green states, “purchasing Tradewater offsets has a direct link to decreasing the amount of GHGs in the atmosphere.”
READ MORE

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.