Project_Chile - Tradewater

Chile Project

Collecting and destroying potent greenhouse gases

Since 2020, Tradewater has been working, with support from local waste manager Regener Chile, to identify CFC and HCFC refrigerant in need of destruction. Remaining stockpiles of CFC and recovered HCFC from end-of-life equipment have already been acquired and are on their way to Europe for proper destruction.

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Project launch ceremony at Thailand's Customs Department

Project impact

Like many governments working hard to enforce the Montreal Protocol and protect the ozone layer, the government of Thailand seizes ODS moving across its borders without proper permissions or documentation. Over a period of years decades ago, the Thai Customs Department seized particularly large volumes of such shipments – totaling more than 10,000 cylinders of ODS. The cylinders have been stored in dozens of depots and warehouses throughout the country since their seizure, taking up space needed for other seized goods and slowly leaking into the atmosphere. By partnering with Tradewater and working to destroy this ODS, we will ensure that more than 1.1 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent is permanently prevented from release into the atmosphere.

Project data:

Total Volume: 40,365 tons

Active: 2020-2024

Registry: ACR

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Batches
Batch Number Tons of CO2e Vintage Batch ID Verifier Sustainable Development Goals Project Documents
Batch 1 40,365 2024 ACR893 Ruby Canyon Environmental (Tuv Sud) SDGs 9, 12, 13 Upcoming

To learn more and secure carbon offset credits, contact us at info@tradewater.us

“In the heart of Chile’s refrigerant reclaiming sector, our partnership with local stakeholders thrives on trust and a shared vision. While facing various complications, we’ve strengthened our bond by overcoming challenges together, collectively reinforcing our commitment to sustainability. Our story is one of resilience, adaptability, and a shared passion for making a positive impact, forging a path forward that exemplifies the power of collaboration in championing sustainability in Chile and beyond.”

– Daniel Ulloa – Projects Coordinator

Why Tradewater?

Our carbon offset credits are:

Permanent

The refrigerants we collect are completely and permanently destroyed.

Additional

There is no mandate to destroy these refrigerants and no funding available to cover the costs. If we don’t do the work, no one else will.

Accurate

The emissions reductions achieved by this work are precisely calculated.

Responsible

Our projects meet UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Contributions to UN Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 9 – Industry, innovation and infrastructure: This project supports inclusive and sustainable industrialization through close collaboration with local stakeholders, as well as the safe collection and destruction of ozone-depleting substances. It also provides an innovative pathway to prevent greenhouse gas emissions.

SDG 12 – Responsible consumption and production: The project supports the collection and destruction of one of the most powerful greenhouse gases in the world, paving the way for the development and use of safer and more environmentally friendly alternatives.

SDG 13 – Climate action: To date, the phase-out of most ODS has not only led to the regeneration of the ozone layer, but also to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), as most ODS are also powerful GHGs. Tradewater is on a mission to prevent the release of ODS gases into the atmosphere. By identifying, collecting, managing, and destroying refrigerant gases in an appropriate manner, Tradewater aims to prevent ozone depletion, negative environmental impacts, and climate change.

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

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Tradewater generates carbon offset credits by collecting, controlling, and destroying harmful greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the form of refrigerant and methane 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.