23 ms·

No Refrigerant Left Behind

406 points by exp1orer 4y ago

ohgreatwtf 4y ago
why not recycle? I can buy these refrigerants today. You say you are working to replace them with greenhouse safe refrigerants. Why are these not economically priced and competitive on the market?
pkulak 4y ago
The writeup mentions fraud, but doesn't say how they plan to keep folks from just buying refrigerant and turning it in. Unless I missed it. Classic "cobra effect" stuff.
jmcwjmcw 4y ago
Really cool approach to decarbonization!
exp1orer 4y ago
Author here, very excited to share this with HN. Been seeing a lot of engineers thinking about getting into climate so I thought people might find it interesting. Happy to answer any questions!
- daniel_reetz 4y ago
  For whatever it's worth, I see this same thing here in Los Angeles. Scrappers cut open fridges, minifridges, AC units, etc and vent the refrigerant wherever they found the device (usually right on the curb). If you could make it profitable for them to capture it, they would. They're not making a ton of money off the copper.
  - exp1orer 4y ago
    Yeah that's definitely an issue! It's probably a bit less tractable than what we're dealing with because 1. Scrappers likely don't have the skills, equipment or inclination that AC technicians do. 2. Those self-contained units typically have a lot less refrigerant than the split AC systems (or large chillers) we see, which require venting in order to remove once installed. A refrigerator might have only 30 grams of charge, vs a split system with 2-3 kg.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  You mention that you destroy the captured refrigerants. Could you elaborate more on how do you accomplish this?
  - exp1orer 4y ago
    We destroy it in an active cement kiln! The Montreal Protocol has a Technology and Economic Assessment Panel outlining approved destruction options[1] and this is one of their approved technologies. It's great for a few reasons: 1. Already operates at negative pressure with a high enough temperature and long enough residence time 2. Alkaline environment neutralizes the HF and HCl that are produced when the refrigerant burns. 3. Already consuming massive amounts of energy so the marginal energy use is negligible. 4. Allows use to use an existing facility instead of building our own -- great for developing countries where building infra is harder (but cement plants are everywhere). [1] https://ozone.unep.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/TEAP-DecXXIX4-TF-Report-April2018.pdf https://ozone.unep.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/TEAP-DecX...
    - moralestapia 4y ago
      Whoa, that's great. Also, thanks for that reference I have something new to read later on :)
    - theogravity 4y ago
      I wish you'd include this information in your blog post as I was wondering the same thing and would be more inclined to contribute.
    - kurupt213 4y ago
      If the temperature and ratios are right on the money, you end up blowing PCDD, PCDF, PCNs and PCBs out the Kiln Exhaust
      - exp1orer 4y ago
        Your bio suggests you know more about the chemical details than I do, but we do have 1. A trial burn done by an independent lab to make sure that under normal operating conditions, when destroying refrigerant the levels of those + other chemicals are below certain thresholds 2. automatic monitoring and shutoff mechanisms if the kiln deviates from normal conditions
- tornato7 4y ago
  Have you reached out to KlimaDAO about this? It’s definitely something they would be interested in
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  Do you have a charity that accepts tax-deductible donations for buying and retiring those exact credits? The tax deductibility and employer gift matching means you could go a lot farther for each dollar a donor is willing to spend.
  - exp1orer 4y ago
    That is a super interesting idea! Hadn't considered it, have you seen anyone doing this with carbon credits before?
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
      Absolutely. https://www.myclimate.org/ https://www.myclimate.org/ in Europe. https://carbonfund.org/ https://carbonfund.org/ seems to be one of the orgs doing it in the US, I would be surprised if there aren't others. Edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=charity+retire+carbon+credits https://www.google.com/search?q=charity+retire+carbon+credit... has plenty more
stevekrouse 4y ago
Refrigerants are this huge elephant in the room in climate change. Everybody knows there a main issue but almost nobody is addressing them. They're not easy nor sexy. Makes this work all the more critical. Go Louis go!
christolles 4y ago
Nobody is working on refrigerants bc they're nerdy and hard. Recoolit is super important!
ohnomatopoeia 4y ago
Thanks for sharing! Based on my reading, reducing refrigerants is one of the highest-impact ways to reduce planet risk. "Our plan is simple and has zero technical risk" What do you see as the biggest risk? And what is your assessment for why no one has pursued this approach before?
shalmanese 4y ago
Planet Money did a story [1] in 2020 about a US team running a very similar scheme with the same business model to get rid of R12 refrigerant in the Midwest. It turns out running a business where you give people money in exchange for their junk is suprisingly harder than you would think. [1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/917060248 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/917060248
- _dark_matter_ 4y ago
  Is it more feasible in less expensive countries? I'd imagine you could pay a tech in Indonesia considerably less than in the Midwest and they'd still consider it a good deal (assuming funding levels are comparable).
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I suspect part of it is just lack of knowledge; if someone showed up at your front door offering you money for some random item in your garage you'd be tempted to politely decline; because if someone is going out of their way to offer you cash, it's probably worth more than they're offering.
  - shalmanese 4y ago
    From the NPR story, it sounds like the business is ultimately constrained by customer acquisition costs and being in the US might actually be an advantage since the digital advertising market is more mature. In fact, now that OP has jogged my memory, I might start using this as an interview question for junior marketing people. If given a budget of $10K, how would you deliver me enough people willing to sell me 1000L of 10+ year old refrigerant? I bet the answers would be revealing and almost all wrong.
    - mh- 4y ago
      ok, what's the "right" answer?
      - shalmanese 4y ago
photochemsyn 4y ago
The problematic refrigerants are pretty diverse, being made up of short carbon chains (1-4 atoms typically) decorated mainly with chlorine or flourine atoms. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene Interestingly the best option for a refrigerant may be CO2 itself, which if collected from the atmosphere has no global warming or ozone depletion issues. The only drawback is CO2 refrigeration equipment has to operate at relatively high pressure, but this isn't a major problem: https://www.rsi.edu/blog/hvacr/carbon-dioxide-refrigerant/ https://www.rsi.edu/blog/hvacr/carbon-dioxide-refrigerant/ Getting rid of the chloro-flouro stuff makes lots of sense, but not producing any of it in the first place would be even better.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I've often wondered what other ways we could do "refrigeration" without requiring such horrible gasses, CO2 would be a nice one (and we already distribute CO2 world-wide for soda), but perhaps something could be done with piezo also.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Depending on your definition of ‘horrible’, ammonia also works well!
  - jabl 4y ago
    In Europe, and I think in much of the rest of the world except the US, isopropane or butane is used in common household refrigerators. Recently EU regulations were changed to allow these to be used in small split AC's as well, provided some flammability precautions are taken in the design and installation of the units. In principle you could also go without phase change refrigerants with the reverse Brayton cycle, essentially running gas turbine cycle in reverse. But AFAIU these are not competitive with phase change refrigerants in the usual temperature ranges used for AC's and refrigerators.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Yes a propane/isobutane blend works well, it's basically a drop-in replacement for R-12 in air conditioners. Straight propane replaces R-22 in freezers. The only drawbacks are that it's flammable, and that for the blend, if there is a a slow leak, the blend ratios change due to different partial pressures of the two gasses. So to recharge, you basically have to vacuum the system and refill with the proper blend. Ammonia also works for industrial applications (the local ice rink uses it) but due to its toxicity it's not ideal for household applications.
josephcsible 4y ago
Why does the refrigerant need to be destroyed rather than reused in new air conditioners?
- bombcar 4y ago
  R12 isn't used anymore, R134a is the new hotness. Or coldness I guess.
  - garaetjjte 4y ago
    R134a is now mostly replaced by R1234yf, at least in cars.
    - lucioperca 4y ago
      R32 in Aircons and R290 (propane) in monoblocks is on the rise in EU-Heatpumps.
  - Brybry 4y ago
    R-134a is being phased out as well. R-32 or R-454b are the new coldness.[1] I believe R-12 and R-22 were phased out because of their ozone depletion potential. In the states R-134a replaced those. R-134a was great! No more ozone layer damage! But its global warming potential is still too high[2] to comply with various climate change pacts and laws (I think California has a law that will limit refrigerant GWP to 750 in 2023 [3] ). It's a bit weird for consumers though because if you're buying an air conditioner/heat pump right now then it's probably still R-134a. Who wants to buy hardware that will last for 15+ years but could cost a significant portion of the original unit price to refill in the event of a leak or installer error? [1] https://us-ac.com/usac-news/r410a-phasedown/ https://us-ac.com/usac-news/r410a-phasedown/ [2] https://www.daikin.com/corporate/why_daikin/benefits/r-32 https://www.daikin.com/corporate/why_daikin/benefits/r-32 [3] https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/January%2030%2C%202020%20Workshop%20Slides.pdf https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/January%2...
    - bombcar 4y ago
morninglight 4y ago
Why are all cars and trucks sold with air conditioning? Is it too much to roll down a window? Why are those who don't use air conditioning paying the "environmental refrigerant tax"? How much refrigerant would be saved if vehicle air conditioning was an additional expense?
- dijonman2 4y ago
  Rolling down windows doesn’t work. I require A/C, it’s not something I’ll give up.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I don't remember the exact threshold (It is definitely the case, over 98 degrees Fahrenheit -Body temperature, but that seems high), where moving air no longer cools you. I think that humidity can bring that threshold waaaayyyy down. I used to live in Maryland. The summers there are brutal. On hot days, rolling down the window is like having a hair dryer pointed at your face. I was talking with a friend of mine in Delhi, a couple of weeks back, when they were having the heat wave. It's no joke. People are dropping dead at their workstations.
    - samatman 4y ago
      The threshold is in fact higher than body temperature for dry air. The point below which air can't cool anything is the wet bulb temperature, and a wet bulb above body temperature is eventually fatal.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
        When I lived in Morocco, they had this Bedouin tribe, called the "Behr-Behr." They were known as "The Blue Nomads." because their skin was often tinged blue, from the dye on the heavy wool robes they wore. In the desert, wool actually keeps you cooler.
        4y ago
Glyptodon 4y ago
Funny enough the compressor on the older heat pump that came w/ my house blew this week after a power surge. Got to watch a smokey mist of R-22 leak for a several hours. I knew the unit was into EoL based on age, but when something seems to work fine it's really hard feel like preemptive replacement is the right choice or priority. At least in the US R-22 is so expensive and people still repair and recharge units not infrequently. Wonder how reasonable or possible capturing leaking refrigerant would be. I was watching it leak and vaguely wondered if it would be possible to catch in a large umbrella.
- lazide 4y ago
  Normally the tech would recapture it, and it is worth something. It must have been a pretty dramatic failure for the coolant to leak from a power surge. That said, ‘reduce, reuse’ comes before ‘recycle’ for a reason. If the unit still worked and was reasonably close efficiency wise, it’s just a waste to replace it when it still functions.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    It probably caused the power surge. What he describes is a fairly common failure mode. The compressors are hermetically sealed, and the weak point is where the AC is plugged into the compressor casing. As they age they corrode once the plug loses its own environmental seal driving up the capacitance of the junction, or the compressor starts to draw increasing amounts of current to start and run, resulting in the plugs melting. Basically its any number of effects, but the result is that the plug shorts/melts/etc and the compressor loses its seal at the same time. Generally this kind of failure was a couple hundred dollar fix. Pull the compressor, braze on a new one, flush the system, vacuum it down, and refill. Only now, the refrigerant can cost a grand, the markup on a $200 Emerson scroll is 4x, the fact that you need a license to work on the system means the tech charges $200 an hour, and it all adds up toe selling someone a new system, that is likely going to last 1/2 as long because R410 runs at 2-3x the pressure, the major manufactures have penny pinched every gram of metal out of the condenser/compressor tubing so its as thin as possible, and a half dozen other factors means that the 30 years a good R22 system would run for is unheard of now.
littlestymaar 4y ago
In France (and maybe in the entire UE), it is mandatory for refrigerant to be collected, and you must bring your old fridge/freezer to a HWRC when you want to dispose of it. However, in a fridge/freezer the refrigerant circulate in metallic tubes, usually made of copper which have great conductivity. And what do you think happen when you leave copper tubes unattended at night? Copper thieves come and scrap the fridge with no regards for the refrigerant being released to the atmosphere…
tristor 4y ago
If anything they are understating the problem refrigerants cause. Not only are most refrigerants more potent from a greenhouse potential, many are based on CFCs that are ozone depleters. We’ve already created a hole in the ozone layer from CFCs being used as aerosol propellants before that practice was banned, but we still have CFC refrigerants in use globally all over the place. In fact propellants are generally refrigerants.
- brnt 4y ago
  As of recent I believe propane and/or CO2 is the only refrigerant left allowed for any indoor use. That seems to be an acceptable gas, or am I mistaken?
  - tristor 4y ago
    I believe the current rule is actually that any refrigerant has to have a GWP (Global Warming Potential) equal to or less than CO2. R290 (propane) has a GWP of 0.02, the new refrigerant for automotive use R1234yf has a GWP of less than 1. CO2 has a GWP of 1. So it's not required that it's CO2 or R290, but rather than you can use any refrigerant that has a GWP of 1 or less. R290 seems an ideal refrigerant, especially since the technology to use it as a refrigerant is so old/mature. The challenge is that it's /highly/ flammable. This is true of most refrigerants with a GWP less than 1. R1234yf partly exists because of a desire to reduce flammability.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Is that a rule for cars or small appliances or something? Current residential air conditioners in the US all use R410a which has a GWP over 2000
      - tristor 4y ago
        It's a rule that the EU set for vehicles. EU-based manufacturers were the first to use r1234yf because of this rule, and American auto manufacturers followed suit to make it an industry standard, but there's no rule in the US other than the existing Clean Air Act, AFAIK. The rule only affects newly manufactured vehicles as well, so there's no requirement to phase out R410A.
lucioperca 4y ago
One can simply use ordinary Propane as an Refrigerant like in your fridge: https://www.green-cooling-initiative.org/network/best-practice/product-indias-first-r290-air-conditioner https://www.green-cooling-initiative.org/network/best-practi...
ajkjk 4y ago
This caused me to google some refrigerants mentioned in the comments, and I gotta say, reading about auto techs' opinions on different refrigerants is... weirdly interesting: https://www.autoserviceprofessional.com/articles/7868-real-world-experience-with-r1234yf-the-new-refrigerant-is-finally-here-are-you-ready https://www.autoserviceprofessional.com/articles/7868-real-w...
- themitigating 4y ago
  It's not a case of opinion. One is better or worse for each relevant attribute, like thermal efficiency, cost, dangers, enviornmental concern, lifespan, etc I often hear that r12 cools better but that's not true at all according to thus Perdue study. There may be other factors though. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D1154%26context%3Diracc&ved=2ahUKEwi98ZiRjdj4AhUmkYkEHWMuD0YQFnoECAcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1dlBEaAodwCnMzUOhVI6Hx https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D...
  - kube-system 4y ago
    > I often hear that r12 cools better I think that came about as a result of people filling old R12 systems with R134A and then complaining that it didn’t work as well as before, back in the 90s.
digb 4y ago
I really really love how this post touches on the bullshit that is the carbon credit market. Question: what incentive do BigCos have to buy your "high quality" carbon offsets vs the inferior ones you mentioned? Do you price cheaper per ton of CO2 credited? At the end of the day they're just trying to comply at the cheapest price possible, right?
- rhaps0dy 4y ago
  The post says these credits are 10x cheaper
  - exp1orer 4y ago
    We are 10x cheaper than the high-quality carbon removal that for example Stripe Climate is purchasing. But we are 10x more expensive than the "low quality" credits that I describe in the post. So overall there is a 100x differential between what is allegedly the same ton of carbon, based on perceived quality and other factors.
- exp1orer 4y ago
  There is definitely a lot of bullshit out there but when companies decide to pay for climate mitigation, even as a marketing ploy, I think that is net good. Many companies are certainly looking to buy the cheapest credits they can find but there are promising indications that things are changing, led by companies like Stripe and Shopify.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  This is a useful business that only exists because of carbon credits. I winced a bit at their attacks on low quality carbon credits because the very idea has been under sustained attack by climate change deniers for decades. Oh, rich people just paying money for carbon credits and still flying around the world, that's not real it's all fake, like climate change. Obviously some are better than others, but the concept itself is useful and worth fighting to improve, not write off.
jws 4y ago
In the US at least, any refrigeration technician should already have passed his EPA 608 or 609 and be fully aware that venting a unit can cost him his card rendering him unable to buy refrigerants. Before working on all but small self contained units he must have access to a refrigerant recovery unit. This a compressor sort of thing that can move the gas from the installed unit into a tank for either reuse on site or taking to a reclamation center, where allegedly they can be paid for it. (Yes, my AC units broke and the time to even get a technician to look at them, was so long I researched how to diagnose them and do the easy fixes, ran into the EPA requirement, studied the material and got my EPA certification, bought a bunch of gear off Amazon and refrigerant from a “good old boy” at an exorbitant price (global shortage, plus most is sold in palette quantities), and fixed my own unit in half the time it would have taken to get an appointment with a professional company. The first unit is working. If I succeed at the second unit I’ll even be money ahead. Of course if my yak had already been shaved maybe it could have tolerated the heat.)
- exp1orer 4y ago
  Well done! I took the 608 Type 1 exam (online open book) but never went beyond that. Venting refrigerant is illegal in most of the world but it's almost impossible to enforce and compliance is typically quite low (good data is, as you can imagine, difficult to find). CARB in California now requires owners of large refrigeration systems (>250 lb of charge IIRC) to report all refrigerant recharge to the state so at least there's some efforts underway.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    The best data for compliance is to walk into any tool store that sells AC vacuum pumps and try to find a recovery machine on the shelf.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      That is something that has bugged me. I have a leak in my car's AC. I have injected the dye, found where the leak is. All I have left is to open the system and replace some old seals, but I can't do that right as the equipment isn't available. So I'm stuck venting to the air as it is the only thing I can do. (I could of course take it in, but some combination of cheap and doing my own maintenance means I don't) Note that the vacuum pump is often a free rental from the auto parts store, I don't know why they can't/don't rent the recovery equipment.
huqedato 4y ago
"...these gases are 2000x worse than CO2 and altogether this problem accounts for 6% of all global emissions." Says who ? Proof ?
- exp1orer 4y ago
  There is a link to the IPCC report a few paragraphs down where you can read about this and other statistics to your heart's content.
endisneigh 4y ago
Why can’t salt water be used as a refrigerant?
- sp332 4y ago
  Refrigerants have to be compressible to increase their temperature above ambient. Or equivalently, to be expandable to cool them. Salt water wouldn't work at all.
  - BenjiWiebe 4y ago
    And refrigerants work best when you can take advantage of a phase change in there to move far more heat than just compressing/releasing.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Water is a refrigerant (R-718). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refrigerants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refrigerants It's not a very good one for general space cooling for the reasons others have stated here, at least near typical ambient conditions. Water / steam are often used for space heating, though there the energy conveyed is typically from combustion rather than via a heat pump as in an air conditioner. Water does work well for cooling high-temperature equipment such as automobile engines and power plants. Both typically operate at or above the standard atmospheric boiling point of water.
  - jabl 4y ago
    Water is a very good heat transfer fluid, it has a huge specific heat capacity compared to many other fluids, it's cheap, abundant, non-toxic, non-flammable. The problem is that if you want to reduce the temperature below ambient you need some kind of expansion cycle, either with a single-phase gas, or something that has the gas-liquid phase transition somewhere in the temperature of interest. Water doesn't really work for common AC or refrigeration uses.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
kky 4y ago
This work is high impact for low effort (relative to carbon removal and sequestration), ready to deploy today, and largely overlooked. This type of effort is crucial to address — as fast as possible. I'm really happy to see this.
wcoenen 4y ago
> our credits are as high-quality as the best carbon removal technology, can scale up much faster, and are currently offered at 1/10th the price I'm confused about this remark about price. Isn't there a market of buyers and sellers? Why would one sell carbon credits below market price?
- exp1orer 4y ago
  Precisely because credits are not really a commodity, so some buyers have preferences about what credits to buy and how much they are willing to pay. There are some subset of buyers and sellers who pretend that all credits are the same, but usually that's an excuse to pay for the cheapest possible credits (which in many cases achieve nothing).
  - moralestapia 4y ago
    Just wanted to say I agree that your credits are of much better quality than the average of what you usually find on the market. Carbon credits right now are like the new (but also old?) shitcoins. I have a startup in this space but we mostly do MRV, always looking for solutions like yours to link to our clients and contribute to this new economy. Send me an email (check profile) to get in touch!
  - wcoenen 4y ago
    If these credits are higher quality as claimed, then they should sell at a higher price, not lower.
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      Selling high quality credits at a higher price isn’t really accomplishing the goal of maximising climate impact. If you just want to get rich, work in finance.
      - wcoenen 4y ago
        Selling at a higher price means more revenue, more revenue means the business can expand faster, faster expansion means climate impact of refrigerants gets solved faster.
Nextgrid 4y ago
I wonder what the carbon impact of shipping the refrigerant back to them is and whether it outweighs the benefits?
- Johnny555 4y ago
  Given the large impact from venting to the atmosphere, it's almost certainly better from a carbon impact standpoint to ship it: Every time he does this with a single air conditioner, it has the same effect as burning 250 gallons of gasoline, which is more than enough to drive from SF to NY and back It surely doesn't consume 250 gallons of gasoline equivalent to ship the collected gas.
aperson_hello 4y ago
Why actively destroy the refrigerant (at least for refrigerants still in use/production)? Most can be reclaimed and re-purified rather than destroying - with a less energy intensive process than making new.
- themitigating 4y ago
  There are replacements for R12 that are much less damaging to the environment (like r134a). Eventually the gas will leave the system from a leak, unexpected damage, shoddy technicians, or the unit being destroyed
  - aperson_hello 4y ago
    R12 isn't the only refrigerant though
    - themitigating 4y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean, I said there are replacements
      - aperson_hello 4y ago
        There are direct replacements and refrigerants that require different equipment. And different refrigerants for different purposes. So all that amounts to a pile of really bad refrigerants (cfcs), newer refrigerants (high GWP), and the newest refrigerants (low GWP) with a half dozen or so varieties for each.
- exp1orer 4y ago
  Good question! In theory, reclaiming gases that are still unrestricted for production/import is at least as good as destruction from a climate perspective. However, virgin refrigerant is really cheap until import bans take hold -- so there is never a point where it is both economically worthwhile and impactful for climate. In theory you could use credits to boost the economics around reclaim but you end up with a very messy additionality story. My sense is that most reclaimers are very low-margin or even loss leaders for the companies that produce/sell the gas! Anyway the short answer is that it's harder for us to figure out in this first push, but we do intend to look into it more closely as we expand.
AlbertCory 4y ago
I am SO lucky to have a friendly neighbor who's an HVAC technician. A relay went out on my A/C last week, and he came over and fixed it the next morning. Pro tip: there are certain advantages to living in a place where not everyone is an engineer in high tech.
asah 4y ago
Is it possible to deactivate these gasses in situ ? I could see that being more successful than transportation, but I know nothing about the chemistry...
tfvlrue 4y ago
I'm glad to see someone taking the initiative to mitigate this problem. I also wonder how much "canned air" dusters contribute overall. If I recall correctly, they're commonly just HFC-134a in a can. But because it's not used as a refrigerant, it's outside the EPA's purview and can just be sprayed into the atmosphere willy-nilly. Using one can is more or less equivalent to venting the refrigerant from a car's AC, yet for some reason it's a common practice.
- function_seven 4y ago
  I just looked up the MSDS[0] for my can of Dust-Off (which I believe is the most popular brand?). It lists the sole ingredient as "Ethane, 1,1-difluoro-", which turns out to be a refrigerant, but not 134a. It's HFC-152a[1]. Looks like it's a much "friendlier" refrigerant than 134 (and of course vastly better than R-12) [0] https://www.sisweb.com/referenc/msds/dust-off-sds.pdf https://www.sisweb.com/referenc/msds/dust-off-sds.pdf [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%2C1-Difluoroethane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%2C1-Difluoroethane
  - tfvlrue 4y ago
    Interesting. Did a little more digging and it looks like both are used for air dusters, with 134a being marketed for "energized circuits" because it's non-flammable (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DNR066 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DNR066). 152a has ~1/10 of the GWP as 134a. In any case, it's still amazing to me how restricted these are when used as a refrigerant, but then they're sold to consumers to spray on whatever they want. It really undercuts the environmental impact of these chemicals.
- kube-system 4y ago
  The can of air duster on my desk is R-152a
lawl 4y ago
I don't necessarily buy this and am too lazy to look deeper into it. But I like your attitude, good luck. Edit: where is this 6% number coming from? https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector Chemical & petrochemical (3.6%): energy-related emissions from the manufacturing of fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, refrigerants, oil and gas extraction, etc.
- exp1orer 4y ago
  1. Incredible line. 2. That 6% is based on the most recent IPCC report which estimates 1.4 GT from HFCs, and another ~1.4 from CFCs+HCFCs, so 2.8 total. OWID seems to get its data from climatetrace, I haven't dug into their data, but if I'm reading that correctly it looks like that is only energy usage from manufacturing, rather than direct emissions of the gases. Looks like maybe this breakdown just ignores refrigerants, which is unfortunately common.
StillBored 4y ago
Refrigerant and climate change is a problem we created by replacing very efficient CFC based refrigerants with a very short lifetime in the atmosphere with "more stable compounds". It was a huge political failure, which was completely focused on the "ozone hole" rather than making wise decisions. Just banning CFC's as propellants, and all the other uses which basically dumped huge quantities into the atmosphere and putting licensing requirements around their use, and enforcing the recapture (aka AC techs are tracked for how much they buy vs return), and not filling leaky systems would have solved the immediate problem. But the legislative bodies were also convinced to legislate a change in equipment/refrigerant to these newer compounds which had a huge positive effect on many manufactures and AC installers bottom line. And now we have to do it again because the people warning about the dangers of these new (frequently patented) refrigerant compounds were ignored. Like the story about American democracy, this is going to be one of those cases of trying all the wrong approaches before doing the right thing.
tellitnow 4y ago
- tellitnow 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - tellitnow 4y ago
    [flagged]
- dokem 4y ago
  I wish HN was more based.
rootusrootus 4y ago
I just had my air conditioner replaced last week, and I walked out to check on the tech doing the work just as he finished removing the refrigerant from the old system. By venting it to atmosphere. forehead slap. I was under the impression the EPA will go after technicians personally if they get caught doing that. R410a may not be the same ozone-depleting refrigerant as R-22, but it's still a lot worse than CO2 for greenhouse effect. I heard they're switching next year away from R410a to something new. But... not propane?
- sbradford26 4y ago
  There is a good chance they might have been purging nitrogen they put into the system. If you are replacing the evaporator and condenser but not the line set, it is normal to purge the existing line set with nitrogen to clear anything out. That is partially what makes it so difficult to catch people doing it, since it is not obvious whether they are venting refrigerant or nitrogen.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Ah, okay, maybe he did capture it after all then. I did notice that it wasn't making any vapor clouds like it seems to when you're unscrewing the lines and a bit escapes. I thought maybe it was just the end of the process and that's why, but nitrogen would totally explain that. He definitely had a bottle of nitrogen on hand because he used that when pressure testing the new system. And it was just a replacement of the evaporator coil and the condenser, so the line set was reused. Your explanation makes perfect sense, thanks!
    - sbradford26 4y ago
      Yeah HVAC techs use nitrogen a lot. They use it for pressure testing, cleaning line sets, flowing while brazing to avoid oxidation, and sometimes even to clean out condensate lines. Hopefully your AC is working well, it is in the mid 90s here today in the New England.
epaulson 4y ago
Refrigerants are really interesting - we phased out a bunch of them a few decades ago because they were destroying ozone, but what we replaced them with had high Global Warming Potential (GWP.) The new thing that all of the HVAC companies are working on are finding new refrigerants that have low GWP and work well in their equipment. One of the tricky things is a lot of the low GWP refrigerants are mildly flammable, so there's some thought about trying to revise the building codes to permit their use.
- Nick87633 4y ago
  And yet people have no issues running natural gas pipes in walls and operating gas cooktops indoors. Bureaucracy gonna bureaucrat.
zbrozek 4y ago
Shouldn't there be provision to verify gas-tightness and recharge the equipment with less-harmful refrigerants?
jakogut 4y ago
> the destruction process permanently neutralizes the chemical This raises a few questions in my mind. TFA makes it sound like the refrigerant boogeyman is a problem of fixed quantity. It sounds like after we've destroyed all the refrigerant, it can cause no more harm, but clearly these refrigerants must be manufactured on a continual basis? Can refrigerants not be recycled? What materials go into the creation of refrigerants? Is anything of value lost in destroying refrigerants, besides the energy that went into making them?
- oliwarner 4y ago
  The refrigerants we use have changed. R22 was replaced by R410a and that will eventually be replaced by units that can run on R290, or less ideally R32 or another. The organisation at work here are targeting developing countries who've been much slower to migrate to less harmful refrigerants, but old units are being cycled out for new ones, so new demand for janky old refrigerant (from failing units, so likely contaminated) is lower than you might think.
  - jakogut 4y ago
    This makes sense, thanks for clarifying. So the refrigerants in use are effectively obsolete, and after they're reclaimed and destroyed, should pose no further risk, as there are better options available.
bilsbie 4y ago
markrazini8 4y ago
[dead]
williamsmj 4y ago
How is this different from https://tradewater.us/ https://tradewater.us/?
- exp1orer 4y ago
  Tradewater is great, they are one of the original inspirations for this approach. The key differences are geography (they are mostly US-focused) and that they pursue stockpiles of gas where we go after the emissions from end-of-life equipment. So their counterfactual is slow leakage over time, and our counterfactual is immediate venting.
anonu 4y ago
Could you make a device that destroys the refrigerant on the spot?
johnla 4y ago
Feels like the perfect thing for a Bill Gates, Elon Musk or other rich guy to bankroll. I know it's not the job of billionaires to do but it should be a government thing. But the Southeast Asian countries probably wouldn't do it and neither would the US do it for another country. The amount they're trying to raise seems like it would be tiny for a billionaire type.
oli5679 4y ago
This article makes me a bit worried about 'cobra effects' https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive "The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income."
- latortuga 4y ago
  This is addressed on the Buy Offsets page. Quoted because I thought the same thing as you: We never pay our partners more than the market price of new refrigerant, removing any possibility of a perverse incentive. And because we use well-studied industrial processes, as approved by TEAP at UNEP, there’s no science risk: no carbon is going to bubble back out in 5 years, like you might worry about with soil, forestry, or other nature-based processes.
techwiz137 4y ago
Full disclosure. I work at a scrap yard and we routinely discharge systems into the air, and I am sure many many other scrap yards do absolutely the same.
jotm 4y ago
Speaking of refrigerants, you can replace R22 directly, R134 sometimes directly but desirably with new oil and capillary, and probably other refrigerants with... R290 - an innovative compound that is very environmentally friendly and cheap. Also known as Propane. I've done it with my home office room A/C, a small 12,000 BTU unit. I couldn't believe it when I found out you can do that. They say R290 is cleaner, purer, blah blah, but the gas from a simple propane tank you can get anywhere works fine. Remains to be seen for how long, so far 2 summers and going strong.
londons_explore 4y ago
Something doesn't quite add up in my mind - I must be missing something, please help HN... So a regular home refrigerator has about 60 grams of R600a in it. It has a global warming potential of 3. That means if you illegally vent it to the atmosphere, you are doing the same environmental harm as venting 180 grams of CO2. However, if you hire a trained technician to extract the gas for you, and he drives 10 km to get to your house, then his van (a brand new average van getting 158 g/CO2 per km) will emit 1580 grams of CO2. Considering this, it seems crazy to bother regulating this stuff.
- koreanguy 4y ago
- thaeli 4y ago
  The regulations are finally starting to acknowledge that. You're allowed to vent propane, CO2, and a few other refrigerants now.
- hristov 4y ago
  R600a has been specifically designed to have a low global warming potential. Unfortunately this is not true for most refrigerants used today, most of them have global warming potentials in the thousands. R600a is still flammable so it should be replaced by a trained technician.
- leguminous 4y ago
  Venting R600A (isobutane) isn't really the problem. This stuff gets vented from things like backpacking stoves fairly regularly. R410A is what's used in most modern HVAC equipment and it has a GWP of around 4000 (it's complicated because it's a mix of two refrigerants). 3000g of R410A might be in a small to moderate-sized system.
- 55555 4y ago
  In Jakarta the worker would drive a scooter (while smoking).
- exp1orer 4y ago
fataliss 4y ago
That's the kind of projects we need to get where we need to be in terms of emissions. It won't be easy, but clever solutions where there is real $$ incentives are the ones that can actually be implemented!
userbinator 4y ago
IMHO the CFCs were one of the biggest advances in technology in the 20th century. Non-toxic, non-flammable, and stable under ordinary conditions, and providing very good efficiency compared to the alternatives. The problem is with large-scale atmospheric releases, not with the substance itself. Thus I am absolutely in agreement with recollecting, reselling, and reusing, but in strong opposition to destroying what would otherwise be useful. The latter only encourages the replacement of equipment in a continued cycle of forced obolescence, which might be far worse from a CO2 perspective. I've always found it a little amusing that R152a, which is a pretty good replacement for R12, you can buy in "gas dusters" and legally vent all you want to the atmosphere, but it's technically illegal according to the EPA to recharge an R12 system with it. This is from the viewpoint of someone who restores and repairs old appliances. Environmental considerations aside, I'd never vent deliberately, just because of how expensive and rare these substances are now --- and not surprisingly, there is an underground market for banned refrigerants too. Thus, "you're throwing away money if you vent refrigerant" is probably going to have a much bigger effect than mentioning "climate change".
- jsmith45 4y ago
  The illegal to retrofit R152a thing is mostly about old systems not being designed to ensure that in the event of a leak people are not exposed to high levels (concentrations of 3.7% v/v or above) for more than 15 seconds. Old designed for R12 were not engineered to meet those guarentees. R152a can be huffed to get high, and doing so can be lethal. Thus we know that prolonged exposures to high enough concentrations of R152a can cause fatal cardiac arrhythmia. So it is fundamentally a safety concern. Just an unfortunate one, considering how good it otherwise is as an R12 replacement.
- avianlyric 4y ago
  Well R152a is a highly flammable gas that produces hydrogen fluoride and carbon monoxide as it burns. R12 on the other hand is used a fire suppressant on submarines. I don’t think banning the use of a high flammable gas in systems originally designed to operate with a fire suppressant is a bad idea. I think it’s quite reasonable to assume that designers of R12 systems didn’t worry about accidental leaks into enclosed environments with ignition sources, on account of an R12 leak being completely safe in that situation. R152a on the other hand, that’s just an explosion waiting to happen.
gennarro 4y ago
Related link on refrigerants and global warming potential: https://appliance.report/gwp/ https://appliance.report/gwp/ It’ll be really interesting to what happens as the next gen of refrigerants rolls out. There was a great link on hn recently about them but I’m unable to locate it.
wanderr 4y ago
Is there any data on this 6% of global emissions claim? Do they mean 6% of CO2e emissions? (in which case the "2000x" claim is redundant and makes this statement overblown, as it's already factored into the CO2e calculation)
- exp1orer 4y ago
  It's 2000x worse on a per-pound basis, using the Global Warming Potential (GWP), and 6% of total emissions on a CO2e basis. They are separate facts which are mentioned to serve different purposes: 6% is to emphasize the scale of the overall problem, and 2000x is to understand the leverage of this approach (small amount of material to handle for the impact).
Samyak1 4y ago
Very interesting
simonjgreen 4y ago
In the UK this is an offense. All refrigerant must be captured.

406 points by exp1orer 4y ago

why not recycle? I can buy these refrigerants today. You say you are working to replace them with greenhouse safe refrigerants. Why are these not economically priced and competitive on the market?

pkulak 4y ago

The writeup mentions fraud, but doesn't say how they plan to keep folks from just buying refrigerant and turning it in. Unless I missed it. Classic "cobra effect" stuff.

jmcwjmcw 4y ago

Really cool approach to decarbonization!

exp1orer 4y ago

Author here, very excited to share this with HN. Been seeing a lot of engineers thinking about getting into climate so I thought people might find it interesting. Happy to answer any questions!

daniel_reetz 4y ago
For whatever it's worth, I see this same thing here in Los Angeles. Scrappers cut open fridges, minifridges, AC units, etc and vent the refrigerant wherever they found the device (usually right on the curb). If you could make it profitable for them to capture it, they would. They're not making a ton of money off the copper.
- exp1orer 4y ago
  Yeah that's definitely an issue! It's probably a bit less tractable than what we're dealing with because 1. Scrappers likely don't have the skills, equipment or inclination that AC technicians do. 2. Those self-contained units typically have a lot less refrigerant than the split AC systems (or large chillers) we see, which require venting in order to remove once installed. A refrigerator might have only 30 grams of charge, vs a split system with 2-3 kg.
moralestapia 4y ago
You mention that you destroy the captured refrigerants. Could you elaborate more on how do you accomplish this?
- exp1orer 4y ago
  We destroy it in an active cement kiln! The Montreal Protocol has a Technology and Economic Assessment Panel outlining approved destruction options[1] and this is one of their approved technologies. It's great for a few reasons: 1. Already operates at negative pressure with a high enough temperature and long enough residence time 2. Alkaline environment neutralizes the HF and HCl that are produced when the refrigerant burns. 3. Already consuming massive amounts of energy so the marginal energy use is negligible. 4. Allows use to use an existing facility instead of building our own -- great for developing countries where building infra is harder (but cement plants are everywhere). [1] https://ozone.unep.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/TEAP-DecXXIX4-TF-Report-April2018.pdf https://ozone.unep.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/TEAP-DecX...
  - moralestapia 4y ago
    Whoa, that's great. Also, thanks for that reference I have something new to read later on :)
  - theogravity 4y ago
    I wish you'd include this information in your blog post as I was wondering the same thing and would be more inclined to contribute.
  - kurupt213 4y ago
    If the temperature and ratios are right on the money, you end up blowing PCDD, PCDF, PCNs and PCBs out the Kiln Exhaust
    - exp1orer 4y ago
      Your bio suggests you know more about the chemical details than I do, but we do have 1. A trial burn done by an independent lab to make sure that under normal operating conditions, when destroying refrigerant the levels of those + other chemicals are below certain thresholds 2. automatic monitoring and shutoff mechanisms if the kiln deviates from normal conditions
tornato7 4y ago
Have you reached out to KlimaDAO about this? It’s definitely something they would be interested in
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
Do you have a charity that accepts tax-deductible donations for buying and retiring those exact credits? The tax deductibility and employer gift matching means you could go a lot farther for each dollar a donor is willing to spend.
- exp1orer 4y ago
  That is a super interesting idea! Hadn't considered it, have you seen anyone doing this with carbon credits before?
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
    Absolutely. https://www.myclimate.org/ https://www.myclimate.org/ in Europe. https://carbonfund.org/ https://carbonfund.org/ seems to be one of the orgs doing it in the US, I would be surprised if there aren't others. Edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=charity+retire+carbon+credits https://www.google.com/search?q=charity+retire+carbon+credit... has plenty more

stevekrouse 4y ago

Refrigerants are this huge elephant in the room in climate change. Everybody knows there a main issue but almost nobody is addressing them. They're not easy nor sexy. Makes this work all the more critical. Go Louis go!

christolles 4y ago

Nobody is working on refrigerants bc they're nerdy and hard. Recoolit is super important!

ohnomatopoeia 4y ago

Thanks for sharing! Based on my reading, reducing refrigerants is one of the highest-impact ways to reduce planet risk. "Our plan is simple and has zero technical risk" What do you see as the biggest risk? And what is your assessment for why no one has pursued this approach before?

shalmanese 4y ago

Planet Money did a story [1] in 2020 about a US team running a very similar scheme with the same business model to get rid of R12 refrigerant in the Midwest. It turns out running a business where you give people money in exchange for their junk is suprisingly harder than you would think. [1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/917060248 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/917060248

_dark_matter_ 4y ago
Is it more feasible in less expensive countries? I'd imagine you could pay a tech in Indonesia considerably less than in the Midwest and they'd still consider it a good deal (assuming funding levels are comparable).
- bombcar 4y ago
  I suspect part of it is just lack of knowledge; if someone showed up at your front door offering you money for some random item in your garage you'd be tempted to politely decline; because if someone is going out of their way to offer you cash, it's probably worth more than they're offering.
- shalmanese 4y ago
  From the NPR story, it sounds like the business is ultimately constrained by customer acquisition costs and being in the US might actually be an advantage since the digital advertising market is more mature. In fact, now that OP has jogged my memory, I might start using this as an interview question for junior marketing people. If given a budget of $10K, how would you deliver me enough people willing to sell me 1000L of 10+ year old refrigerant? I bet the answers would be revealing and almost all wrong.
  - mh- 4y ago
    ok, what's the "right" answer?
    - shalmanese 4y ago

photochemsyn 4y ago

The problematic refrigerants are pretty diverse, being made up of short carbon chains (1-4 atoms typically) decorated mainly with chlorine or flourine atoms. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene Interestingly the best option for a refrigerant may be CO2 itself, which if collected from the atmosphere has no global warming or ozone depletion issues. The only drawback is CO2 refrigeration equipment has to operate at relatively high pressure, but this isn't a major problem: https://www.rsi.edu/blog/hvacr/carbon-dioxide-refrigerant/ https://www.rsi.edu/blog/hvacr/carbon-dioxide-refrigerant/ Getting rid of the chloro-flouro stuff makes lots of sense, but not producing any of it in the first place would be even better.

bombcar 4y ago
I've often wondered what other ways we could do "refrigeration" without requiring such horrible gasses, CO2 would be a nice one (and we already distribute CO2 world-wide for soda), but perhaps something could be done with piezo also.
- lazide 4y ago
  Depending on your definition of ‘horrible’, ammonia also works well!
- jabl 4y ago
  In Europe, and I think in much of the rest of the world except the US, isopropane or butane is used in common household refrigerators. Recently EU regulations were changed to allow these to be used in small split AC's as well, provided some flammability precautions are taken in the design and installation of the units. In principle you could also go without phase change refrigerants with the reverse Brayton cycle, essentially running gas turbine cycle in reverse. But AFAIU these are not competitive with phase change refrigerants in the usual temperature ranges used for AC's and refrigerators.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Yes a propane/isobutane blend works well, it's basically a drop-in replacement for R-12 in air conditioners. Straight propane replaces R-22 in freezers. The only drawbacks are that it's flammable, and that for the blend, if there is a a slow leak, the blend ratios change due to different partial pressures of the two gasses. So to recharge, you basically have to vacuum the system and refill with the proper blend. Ammonia also works for industrial applications (the local ice rink uses it) but due to its toxicity it's not ideal for household applications.

josephcsible 4y ago

Why does the refrigerant need to be destroyed rather than reused in new air conditioners?

bombcar 4y ago
R12 isn't used anymore, R134a is the new hotness. Or coldness I guess.
- garaetjjte 4y ago
  R134a is now mostly replaced by R1234yf, at least in cars.
  - lucioperca 4y ago
    R32 in Aircons and R290 (propane) in monoblocks is on the rise in EU-Heatpumps.
- Brybry 4y ago
  R-134a is being phased out as well. R-32 or R-454b are the new coldness.[1] I believe R-12 and R-22 were phased out because of their ozone depletion potential. In the states R-134a replaced those. R-134a was great! No more ozone layer damage! But its global warming potential is still too high[2] to comply with various climate change pacts and laws (I think California has a law that will limit refrigerant GWP to 750 in 2023 [3] ). It's a bit weird for consumers though because if you're buying an air conditioner/heat pump right now then it's probably still R-134a. Who wants to buy hardware that will last for 15+ years but could cost a significant portion of the original unit price to refill in the event of a leak or installer error? [1] https://us-ac.com/usac-news/r410a-phasedown/ https://us-ac.com/usac-news/r410a-phasedown/ [2] https://www.daikin.com/corporate/why_daikin/benefits/r-32 https://www.daikin.com/corporate/why_daikin/benefits/r-32 [3] https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/January%2030%2C%202020%20Workshop%20Slides.pdf https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/January%2...
  - bombcar 4y ago

morninglight 4y ago

Why are all cars and trucks sold with air conditioning? Is it too much to roll down a window? Why are those who don't use air conditioning paying the "environmental refrigerant tax"? How much refrigerant would be saved if vehicle air conditioning was an additional expense?

dijonman2 4y ago
Rolling down windows doesn’t work. I require A/C, it’s not something I’ll give up.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I don't remember the exact threshold (It is definitely the case, over 98 degrees Fahrenheit -Body temperature, but that seems high), where moving air no longer cools you. I think that humidity can bring that threshold waaaayyyy down. I used to live in Maryland. The summers there are brutal. On hot days, rolling down the window is like having a hair dryer pointed at your face. I was talking with a friend of mine in Delhi, a couple of weeks back, when they were having the heat wave. It's no joke. People are dropping dead at their workstations.
  - samatman 4y ago
    The threshold is in fact higher than body temperature for dry air. The point below which air can't cool anything is the wet bulb temperature, and a wet bulb above body temperature is eventually fatal.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      When I lived in Morocco, they had this Bedouin tribe, called the "Behr-Behr." They were known as "The Blue Nomads." because their skin was often tinged blue, from the dye on the heavy wool robes they wore. In the desert, wool actually keeps you cooler.
      - 4y ago

Glyptodon 4y ago

Funny enough the compressor on the older heat pump that came w/ my house blew this week after a power surge. Got to watch a smokey mist of R-22 leak for a several hours. I knew the unit was into EoL based on age, but when something seems to work fine it's really hard feel like preemptive replacement is the right choice or priority. At least in the US R-22 is so expensive and people still repair and recharge units not infrequently. Wonder how reasonable or possible capturing leaking refrigerant would be. I was watching it leak and vaguely wondered if it would be possible to catch in a large umbrella.

lazide 4y ago
Normally the tech would recapture it, and it is worth something. It must have been a pretty dramatic failure for the coolant to leak from a power surge. That said, ‘reduce, reuse’ comes before ‘recycle’ for a reason. If the unit still worked and was reasonably close efficiency wise, it’s just a waste to replace it when it still functions.
- StillBored 4y ago
  It probably caused the power surge. What he describes is a fairly common failure mode. The compressors are hermetically sealed, and the weak point is where the AC is plugged into the compressor casing. As they age they corrode once the plug loses its own environmental seal driving up the capacitance of the junction, or the compressor starts to draw increasing amounts of current to start and run, resulting in the plugs melting. Basically its any number of effects, but the result is that the plug shorts/melts/etc and the compressor loses its seal at the same time. Generally this kind of failure was a couple hundred dollar fix. Pull the compressor, braze on a new one, flush the system, vacuum it down, and refill. Only now, the refrigerant can cost a grand, the markup on a $200 Emerson scroll is 4x, the fact that you need a license to work on the system means the tech charges $200 an hour, and it all adds up toe selling someone a new system, that is likely going to last 1/2 as long because R410 runs at 2-3x the pressure, the major manufactures have penny pinched every gram of metal out of the condenser/compressor tubing so its as thin as possible, and a half dozen other factors means that the 30 years a good R22 system would run for is unheard of now.

littlestymaar 4y ago

In France (and maybe in the entire UE), it is mandatory for refrigerant to be collected, and you must bring your old fridge/freezer to a HWRC when you want to dispose of it. However, in a fridge/freezer the refrigerant circulate in metallic tubes, usually made of copper which have great conductivity. And what do you think happen when you leave copper tubes unattended at night? Copper thieves come and scrap the fridge with no regards for the refrigerant being released to the atmosphere…

tristor 4y ago

If anything they are understating the problem refrigerants cause. Not only are most refrigerants more potent from a greenhouse potential, many are based on CFCs that are ozone depleters. We’ve already created a hole in the ozone layer from CFCs being used as aerosol propellants before that practice was banned, but we still have CFC refrigerants in use globally all over the place. In fact propellants are generally refrigerants.

brnt 4y ago
As of recent I believe propane and/or CO2 is the only refrigerant left allowed for any indoor use. That seems to be an acceptable gas, or am I mistaken?
- tristor 4y ago
  I believe the current rule is actually that any refrigerant has to have a GWP (Global Warming Potential) equal to or less than CO2. R290 (propane) has a GWP of 0.02, the new refrigerant for automotive use R1234yf has a GWP of less than 1. CO2 has a GWP of 1. So it's not required that it's CO2 or R290, but rather than you can use any refrigerant that has a GWP of 1 or less. R290 seems an ideal refrigerant, especially since the technology to use it as a refrigerant is so old/mature. The challenge is that it's /highly/ flammable. This is true of most refrigerants with a GWP less than 1. R1234yf partly exists because of a desire to reduce flammability.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Is that a rule for cars or small appliances or something? Current residential air conditioners in the US all use R410a which has a GWP over 2000
    - tristor 4y ago
      It's a rule that the EU set for vehicles. EU-based manufacturers were the first to use r1234yf because of this rule, and American auto manufacturers followed suit to make it an industry standard, but there's no rule in the US other than the existing Clean Air Act, AFAIK. The rule only affects newly manufactured vehicles as well, so there's no requirement to phase out R410A.

lucioperca 4y ago

One can simply use ordinary Propane as an Refrigerant like in your fridge: https://www.green-cooling-initiative.org/network/best-practice/product-indias-first-r290-air-conditioner https://www.green-cooling-initiative.org/network/best-practi...

ajkjk 4y ago

This caused me to google some refrigerants mentioned in the comments, and I gotta say, reading about auto techs' opinions on different refrigerants is... weirdly interesting: https://www.autoserviceprofessional.com/articles/7868-real-world-experience-with-r1234yf-the-new-refrigerant-is-finally-here-are-you-ready https://www.autoserviceprofessional.com/articles/7868-real-w...

themitigating 4y ago
It's not a case of opinion. One is better or worse for each relevant attribute, like thermal efficiency, cost, dangers, enviornmental concern, lifespan, etc I often hear that r12 cools better but that's not true at all according to thus Perdue study. There may be other factors though. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D1154%26context%3Diracc&ved=2ahUKEwi98ZiRjdj4AhUmkYkEHWMuD0YQFnoECAcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1dlBEaAodwCnMzUOhVI6Hx https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D...
- kube-system 4y ago
  > I often hear that r12 cools better I think that came about as a result of people filling old R12 systems with R134A and then complaining that it didn’t work as well as before, back in the 90s.

digb 4y ago

I really really love how this post touches on the bullshit that is the carbon credit market. Question: what incentive do BigCos have to buy your "high quality" carbon offsets vs the inferior ones you mentioned? Do you price cheaper per ton of CO2 credited? At the end of the day they're just trying to comply at the cheapest price possible, right?

rhaps0dy 4y ago
The post says these credits are 10x cheaper
- exp1orer 4y ago
  We are 10x cheaper than the high-quality carbon removal that for example Stripe Climate is purchasing. But we are 10x more expensive than the "low quality" credits that I describe in the post. So overall there is a 100x differential between what is allegedly the same ton of carbon, based on perceived quality and other factors.
exp1orer 4y ago
There is definitely a lot of bullshit out there but when companies decide to pay for climate mitigation, even as a marketing ploy, I think that is net good. Many companies are certainly looking to buy the cheapest credits they can find but there are promising indications that things are changing, led by companies like Stripe and Shopify.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
This is a useful business that only exists because of carbon credits. I winced a bit at their attacks on low quality carbon credits because the very idea has been under sustained attack by climate change deniers for decades. Oh, rich people just paying money for carbon credits and still flying around the world, that's not real it's all fake, like climate change. Obviously some are better than others, but the concept itself is useful and worth fighting to improve, not write off.

jws 4y ago

In the US at least, any refrigeration technician should already have passed his EPA 608 or 609 and be fully aware that venting a unit can cost him his card rendering him unable to buy refrigerants. Before working on all but small self contained units he must have access to a refrigerant recovery unit. This a compressor sort of thing that can move the gas from the installed unit into a tank for either reuse on site or taking to a reclamation center, where allegedly they can be paid for it. (Yes, my AC units broke and the time to even get a technician to look at them, was so long I researched how to diagnose them and do the easy fixes, ran into the EPA requirement, studied the material and got my EPA certification, bought a bunch of gear off Amazon and refrigerant from a “good old boy” at an exorbitant price (global shortage, plus most is sold in palette quantities), and fixed my own unit in half the time it would have taken to get an appointment with a professional company. The first unit is working. If I succeed at the second unit I’ll even be money ahead. Of course if my yak had already been shaved maybe it could have tolerated the heat.)

exp1orer 4y ago
Well done! I took the 608 Type 1 exam (online open book) but never went beyond that. Venting refrigerant is illegal in most of the world but it's almost impossible to enforce and compliance is typically quite low (good data is, as you can imagine, difficult to find). CARB in California now requires owners of large refrigeration systems (>250 lb of charge IIRC) to report all refrigerant recharge to the state so at least there's some efforts underway.
- kube-system 4y ago
  The best data for compliance is to walk into any tool store that sells AC vacuum pumps and try to find a recovery machine on the shelf.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    That is something that has bugged me. I have a leak in my car's AC. I have injected the dye, found where the leak is. All I have left is to open the system and replace some old seals, but I can't do that right as the equipment isn't available. So I'm stuck venting to the air as it is the only thing I can do. (I could of course take it in, but some combination of cheap and doing my own maintenance means I don't) Note that the vacuum pump is often a free rental from the auto parts store, I don't know why they can't/don't rent the recovery equipment.

huqedato 4y ago

"...these gases are 2000x worse than CO2 and altogether this problem accounts for 6% of all global emissions." Says who ? Proof ?

exp1orer 4y ago
There is a link to the IPCC report a few paragraphs down where you can read about this and other statistics to your heart's content.

endisneigh 4y ago

Why can’t salt water be used as a refrigerant?

sp332 4y ago
Refrigerants have to be compressible to increase their temperature above ambient. Or equivalently, to be expandable to cool them. Salt water wouldn't work at all.
- BenjiWiebe 4y ago
  And refrigerants work best when you can take advantage of a phase change in there to move far more heat than just compressing/releasing.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Water is a refrigerant (R-718). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refrigerants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refrigerants It's not a very good one for general space cooling for the reasons others have stated here, at least near typical ambient conditions. Water / steam are often used for space heating, though there the energy conveyed is typically from combustion rather than via a heat pump as in an air conditioner. Water does work well for cooling high-temperature equipment such as automobile engines and power plants. Both typically operate at or above the standard atmospheric boiling point of water.
- jabl 4y ago
  Water is a very good heat transfer fluid, it has a huge specific heat capacity compared to many other fluids, it's cheap, abundant, non-toxic, non-flammable. The problem is that if you want to reduce the temperature below ambient you need some kind of expansion cycle, either with a single-phase gas, or something that has the gas-liquid phase transition somewhere in the temperature of interest. Water doesn't really work for common AC or refrigeration uses.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago

kky 4y ago

This work is high impact for low effort (relative to carbon removal and sequestration), ready to deploy today, and largely overlooked. This type of effort is crucial to address — as fast as possible. I'm really happy to see this.

wcoenen 4y ago

> our credits are as high-quality as the best carbon removal technology, can scale up much faster, and are currently offered at 1/10th the price I'm confused about this remark about price. Isn't there a market of buyers and sellers? Why would one sell carbon credits below market price?

exp1orer 4y ago
Precisely because credits are not really a commodity, so some buyers have preferences about what credits to buy and how much they are willing to pay. There are some subset of buyers and sellers who pretend that all credits are the same, but usually that's an excuse to pay for the cheapest possible credits (which in many cases achieve nothing).
- moralestapia 4y ago
  Just wanted to say I agree that your credits are of much better quality than the average of what you usually find on the market. Carbon credits right now are like the new (but also old?) shitcoins. I have a startup in this space but we mostly do MRV, always looking for solutions like yours to link to our clients and contribute to this new economy. Send me an email (check profile) to get in touch!
- wcoenen 4y ago
  If these credits are higher quality as claimed, then they should sell at a higher price, not lower.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    Selling high quality credits at a higher price isn’t really accomplishing the goal of maximising climate impact. If you just want to get rich, work in finance.
    - wcoenen 4y ago
      Selling at a higher price means more revenue, more revenue means the business can expand faster, faster expansion means climate impact of refrigerants gets solved faster.

Nextgrid 4y ago

I wonder what the carbon impact of shipping the refrigerant back to them is and whether it outweighs the benefits?

Johnny555 4y ago
Given the large impact from venting to the atmosphere, it's almost certainly better from a carbon impact standpoint to ship it: Every time he does this with a single air conditioner, it has the same effect as burning 250 gallons of gasoline, which is more than enough to drive from SF to NY and back It surely doesn't consume 250 gallons of gasoline equivalent to ship the collected gas.

aperson_hello 4y ago

Why actively destroy the refrigerant (at least for refrigerants still in use/production)? Most can be reclaimed and re-purified rather than destroying - with a less energy intensive process than making new.

themitigating 4y ago
There are replacements for R12 that are much less damaging to the environment (like r134a). Eventually the gas will leave the system from a leak, unexpected damage, shoddy technicians, or the unit being destroyed
- aperson_hello 4y ago
  R12 isn't the only refrigerant though
  - themitigating 4y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean, I said there are replacements
    - aperson_hello 4y ago
      There are direct replacements and refrigerants that require different equipment. And different refrigerants for different purposes. So all that amounts to a pile of really bad refrigerants (cfcs), newer refrigerants (high GWP), and the newest refrigerants (low GWP) with a half dozen or so varieties for each.
exp1orer 4y ago
Good question! In theory, reclaiming gases that are still unrestricted for production/import is at least as good as destruction from a climate perspective. However, virgin refrigerant is really cheap until import bans take hold -- so there is never a point where it is both economically worthwhile and impactful for climate. In theory you could use credits to boost the economics around reclaim but you end up with a very messy additionality story. My sense is that most reclaimers are very low-margin or even loss leaders for the companies that produce/sell the gas! Anyway the short answer is that it's harder for us to figure out in this first push, but we do intend to look into it more closely as we expand.

AlbertCory 4y ago

I am SO lucky to have a friendly neighbor who's an HVAC technician. A relay went out on my A/C last week, and he came over and fixed it the next morning. Pro tip: there are certain advantages to living in a place where not everyone is an engineer in high tech.

asah 4y ago

Is it possible to deactivate these gasses in situ ? I could see that being more successful than transportation, but I know nothing about the chemistry...

tfvlrue 4y ago

I'm glad to see someone taking the initiative to mitigate this problem. I also wonder how much "canned air" dusters contribute overall. If I recall correctly, they're commonly just HFC-134a in a can. But because it's not used as a refrigerant, it's outside the EPA's purview and can just be sprayed into the atmosphere willy-nilly. Using one can is more or less equivalent to venting the refrigerant from a car's AC, yet for some reason it's a common practice.

function_seven 4y ago
I just looked up the MSDS[0] for my can of Dust-Off (which I believe is the most popular brand?). It lists the sole ingredient as "Ethane, 1,1-difluoro-", which turns out to be a refrigerant, but not 134a. It's HFC-152a[1]. Looks like it's a much "friendlier" refrigerant than 134 (and of course vastly better than R-12) [0] https://www.sisweb.com/referenc/msds/dust-off-sds.pdf https://www.sisweb.com/referenc/msds/dust-off-sds.pdf [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%2C1-Difluoroethane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%2C1-Difluoroethane
- tfvlrue 4y ago
  Interesting. Did a little more digging and it looks like both are used for air dusters, with 134a being marketed for "energized circuits" because it's non-flammable (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DNR066 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DNR066). 152a has ~1/10 of the GWP as 134a. In any case, it's still amazing to me how restricted these are when used as a refrigerant, but then they're sold to consumers to spray on whatever they want. It really undercuts the environmental impact of these chemicals.
kube-system 4y ago
The can of air duster on my desk is R-152a

lawl 4y ago

I don't necessarily buy this and am too lazy to look deeper into it. But I like your attitude, good luck. Edit: where is this 6% number coming from? https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector Chemical & petrochemical (3.6%): energy-related emissions from the manufacturing of fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, refrigerants, oil and gas extraction, etc.

exp1orer 4y ago
1. Incredible line. 2. That 6% is based on the most recent IPCC report which estimates 1.4 GT from HFCs, and another ~1.4 from CFCs+HCFCs, so 2.8 total. OWID seems to get its data from climatetrace, I haven't dug into their data, but if I'm reading that correctly it looks like that is only energy usage from manufacturing, rather than direct emissions of the gases. Looks like maybe this breakdown just ignores refrigerants, which is unfortunately common.

StillBored 4y ago

Refrigerant and climate change is a problem we created by replacing very efficient CFC based refrigerants with a very short lifetime in the atmosphere with "more stable compounds". It was a huge political failure, which was completely focused on the "ozone hole" rather than making wise decisions. Just banning CFC's as propellants, and all the other uses which basically dumped huge quantities into the atmosphere and putting licensing requirements around their use, and enforcing the recapture (aka AC techs are tracked for how much they buy vs return), and not filling leaky systems would have solved the immediate problem. But the legislative bodies were also convinced to legislate a change in equipment/refrigerant to these newer compounds which had a huge positive effect on many manufactures and AC installers bottom line. And now we have to do it again because the people warning about the dangers of these new (frequently patented) refrigerant compounds were ignored. Like the story about American democracy, this is going to be one of those cases of trying all the wrong approaches before doing the right thing.

tellitnow 4y ago

tellitnow 4y ago
[flagged]
- tellitnow 4y ago
  [flagged]
dokem 4y ago
I wish HN was more based.

rootusrootus 4y ago

I just had my air conditioner replaced last week, and I walked out to check on the tech doing the work just as he finished removing the refrigerant from the old system. By venting it to atmosphere. forehead slap. I was under the impression the EPA will go after technicians personally if they get caught doing that. R410a may not be the same ozone-depleting refrigerant as R-22, but it's still a lot worse than CO2 for greenhouse effect. I heard they're switching next year away from R410a to something new. But... not propane?

sbradford26 4y ago
There is a good chance they might have been purging nitrogen they put into the system. If you are replacing the evaporator and condenser but not the line set, it is normal to purge the existing line set with nitrogen to clear anything out. That is partially what makes it so difficult to catch people doing it, since it is not obvious whether they are venting refrigerant or nitrogen.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Ah, okay, maybe he did capture it after all then. I did notice that it wasn't making any vapor clouds like it seems to when you're unscrewing the lines and a bit escapes. I thought maybe it was just the end of the process and that's why, but nitrogen would totally explain that. He definitely had a bottle of nitrogen on hand because he used that when pressure testing the new system. And it was just a replacement of the evaporator coil and the condenser, so the line set was reused. Your explanation makes perfect sense, thanks!
  - sbradford26 4y ago
    Yeah HVAC techs use nitrogen a lot. They use it for pressure testing, cleaning line sets, flowing while brazing to avoid oxidation, and sometimes even to clean out condensate lines. Hopefully your AC is working well, it is in the mid 90s here today in the New England.

epaulson 4y ago

Refrigerants are really interesting - we phased out a bunch of them a few decades ago because they were destroying ozone, but what we replaced them with had high Global Warming Potential (GWP.) The new thing that all of the HVAC companies are working on are finding new refrigerants that have low GWP and work well in their equipment. One of the tricky things is a lot of the low GWP refrigerants are mildly flammable, so there's some thought about trying to revise the building codes to permit their use.

Nick87633 4y ago
And yet people have no issues running natural gas pipes in walls and operating gas cooktops indoors. Bureaucracy gonna bureaucrat.

zbrozek 4y ago

Shouldn't there be provision to verify gas-tightness and recharge the equipment with less-harmful refrigerants?

jakogut 4y ago

> the destruction process permanently neutralizes the chemical This raises a few questions in my mind. TFA makes it sound like the refrigerant boogeyman is a problem of fixed quantity. It sounds like after we've destroyed all the refrigerant, it can cause no more harm, but clearly these refrigerants must be manufactured on a continual basis? Can refrigerants not be recycled? What materials go into the creation of refrigerants? Is anything of value lost in destroying refrigerants, besides the energy that went into making them?

oliwarner 4y ago
The refrigerants we use have changed. R22 was replaced by R410a and that will eventually be replaced by units that can run on R290, or less ideally R32 or another. The organisation at work here are targeting developing countries who've been much slower to migrate to less harmful refrigerants, but old units are being cycled out for new ones, so new demand for janky old refrigerant (from failing units, so likely contaminated) is lower than you might think.
- jakogut 4y ago
  This makes sense, thanks for clarifying. So the refrigerants in use are effectively obsolete, and after they're reclaimed and destroyed, should pose no further risk, as there are better options available.

bilsbie 4y ago

markrazini8 4y ago

[dead]

williamsmj 4y ago

How is this different from https://tradewater.us/ https://tradewater.us/?

exp1orer 4y ago
Tradewater is great, they are one of the original inspirations for this approach. The key differences are geography (they are mostly US-focused) and that they pursue stockpiles of gas where we go after the emissions from end-of-life equipment. So their counterfactual is slow leakage over time, and our counterfactual is immediate venting.

anonu 4y ago

Could you make a device that destroys the refrigerant on the spot?

johnla 4y ago

Feels like the perfect thing for a Bill Gates, Elon Musk or other rich guy to bankroll. I know it's not the job of billionaires to do but it should be a government thing. But the Southeast Asian countries probably wouldn't do it and neither would the US do it for another country. The amount they're trying to raise seems like it would be tiny for a billionaire type.

oli5679 4y ago

This article makes me a bit worried about 'cobra effects' https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive "The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income."

latortuga 4y ago
This is addressed on the Buy Offsets page. Quoted because I thought the same thing as you: We never pay our partners more than the market price of new refrigerant, removing any possibility of a perverse incentive. And because we use well-studied industrial processes, as approved by TEAP at UNEP, there’s no science risk: no carbon is going to bubble back out in 5 years, like you might worry about with soil, forestry, or other nature-based processes.

techwiz137 4y ago

Full disclosure. I work at a scrap yard and we routinely discharge systems into the air, and I am sure many many other scrap yards do absolutely the same.

jotm 4y ago

Speaking of refrigerants, you can replace R22 directly, R134 sometimes directly but desirably with new oil and capillary, and probably other refrigerants with... R290 - an innovative compound that is very environmentally friendly and cheap. Also known as Propane. I've done it with my home office room A/C, a small 12,000 BTU unit. I couldn't believe it when I found out you can do that. They say R290 is cleaner, purer, blah blah, but the gas from a simple propane tank you can get anywhere works fine. Remains to be seen for how long, so far 2 summers and going strong.

londons_explore 4y ago

Something doesn't quite add up in my mind - I must be missing something, please help HN... So a regular home refrigerator has about 60 grams of R600a in it. It has a global warming potential of 3. That means if you illegally vent it to the atmosphere, you are doing the same environmental harm as venting 180 grams of CO2. However, if you hire a trained technician to extract the gas for you, and he drives 10 km to get to your house, then his van (a brand new average van getting 158 g/CO2 per km) will emit 1580 grams of CO2. Considering this, it seems crazy to bother regulating this stuff.

koreanguy 4y ago
thaeli 4y ago
The regulations are finally starting to acknowledge that. You're allowed to vent propane, CO2, and a few other refrigerants now.
hristov 4y ago
R600a has been specifically designed to have a low global warming potential. Unfortunately this is not true for most refrigerants used today, most of them have global warming potentials in the thousands. R600a is still flammable so it should be replaced by a trained technician.
leguminous 4y ago
Venting R600A (isobutane) isn't really the problem. This stuff gets vented from things like backpacking stoves fairly regularly. R410A is what's used in most modern HVAC equipment and it has a GWP of around 4000 (it's complicated because it's a mix of two refrigerants). 3000g of R410A might be in a small to moderate-sized system.
55555 4y ago
In Jakarta the worker would drive a scooter (while smoking).
exp1orer 4y ago

fataliss 4y ago

That's the kind of projects we need to get where we need to be in terms of emissions. It won't be easy, but clever solutions where there is real $$ incentives are the ones that can actually be implemented!

userbinator 4y ago

IMHO the CFCs were one of the biggest advances in technology in the 20th century. Non-toxic, non-flammable, and stable under ordinary conditions, and providing very good efficiency compared to the alternatives. The problem is with large-scale atmospheric releases, not with the substance itself. Thus I am absolutely in agreement with recollecting, reselling, and reusing, but in strong opposition to destroying what would otherwise be useful. The latter only encourages the replacement of equipment in a continued cycle of forced obolescence, which might be far worse from a CO2 perspective. I've always found it a little amusing that R152a, which is a pretty good replacement for R12, you can buy in "gas dusters" and legally vent all you want to the atmosphere, but it's technically illegal according to the EPA to recharge an R12 system with it. This is from the viewpoint of someone who restores and repairs old appliances. Environmental considerations aside, I'd never vent deliberately, just because of how expensive and rare these substances are now --- and not surprisingly, there is an underground market for banned refrigerants too. Thus, "you're throwing away money if you vent refrigerant" is probably going to have a much bigger effect than mentioning "climate change".

jsmith45 4y ago
The illegal to retrofit R152a thing is mostly about old systems not being designed to ensure that in the event of a leak people are not exposed to high levels (concentrations of 3.7% v/v or above) for more than 15 seconds. Old designed for R12 were not engineered to meet those guarentees. R152a can be huffed to get high, and doing so can be lethal. Thus we know that prolonged exposures to high enough concentrations of R152a can cause fatal cardiac arrhythmia. So it is fundamentally a safety concern. Just an unfortunate one, considering how good it otherwise is as an R12 replacement.
avianlyric 4y ago
Well R152a is a highly flammable gas that produces hydrogen fluoride and carbon monoxide as it burns. R12 on the other hand is used a fire suppressant on submarines. I don’t think banning the use of a high flammable gas in systems originally designed to operate with a fire suppressant is a bad idea. I think it’s quite reasonable to assume that designers of R12 systems didn’t worry about accidental leaks into enclosed environments with ignition sources, on account of an R12 leak being completely safe in that situation. R152a on the other hand, that’s just an explosion waiting to happen.

gennarro 4y ago

Related link on refrigerants and global warming potential: https://appliance.report/gwp/ https://appliance.report/gwp/ It’ll be really interesting to what happens as the next gen of refrigerants rolls out. There was a great link on hn recently about them but I’m unable to locate it.

wanderr 4y ago

Is there any data on this 6% of global emissions claim? Do they mean 6% of CO2e emissions? (in which case the "2000x" claim is redundant and makes this statement overblown, as it's already factored into the CO2e calculation)

exp1orer 4y ago
It's 2000x worse on a per-pound basis, using the Global Warming Potential (GWP), and 6% of total emissions on a CO2e basis. They are separate facts which are mentioned to serve different purposes: 6% is to emphasize the scale of the overall problem, and 2000x is to understand the leverage of this approach (small amount of material to handle for the impact).

Samyak1 4y ago

Very interesting

simonjgreen 4y ago

In the UK this is an offense. All refrigerant must be captured.