Greenpeace 2010: Natural Refrigerants are perfectly apt to replace HFCs
[ added 15 June, 2010 ]
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“There is already a wide array of safe and commercially proven HFC-free technologies available to meet nearly all those human needs that were formerly met by fluorocarbons”, is the conclusion of the Greenpeace Cool Technologies Report 2010.
Titled ‘COOL TECHNOLOGIES: WORKING WITHOUT HFCs - 2010: Examples of HFC-Free Cooling Technologies in Various Industrial Sectors’, the Greenpeace report brings impressive examples for the application of natural refrigerants in a number of applications and shortly presents the companies offering or using these technologies. HFC-free products are entering the market almost on a weekly basis and cover nearly the full spectrum of applications. And although, so far, HFC-free applications are mainly used in developed countries, they offer a great opportunity for developing countries to leap-frog HFCs on their way of phasing out HCFCs and to choose directly natural refrigerants like CO2, hydrocarbons or ammonia as an environmentally and economically sustainable solution.
Greenfreeze and SolarChill
In 1992, Greenpeace developed HFC-free refrigerators that use hydrocarbons as refrigerant. The technology is called Greenfreeze and has been so well adopted that there are now more than 400 million hydrocarbon or Greenfreeze refrigerators in the world, with 35-40% of the annual global production of domestic refrigerators and freezers in general (~100 million units/year) being Greenfreeze.
Greenfreeze technology dominating the European, Japanese and Chinese market, all major manufacturers in these markets are producing Greenfreeze refrigerators. In China, 75% of new domestic refrigerators use the hydrocarbon R-600a. Greenfreeze refrigerators are also produced in Latin America (Argentina and Brasil) and are available in North America (Canada, Mexico, although not in the U.S. yet).
Another breakthrough technology is SolarChill, a small vaccine refrigerator that operates directly from solar photovoltaic panels without batteries or a charge controller. SolarChill was born through separate discussions between Greenpeace,the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Health Organization. The big challenge: providing affordable and environmentally safe refrigeration for the maintenance of vaccines and medicines, and the preservation of food, in parts of the world that have no electricity or have unreliable supplies of electricity. At the moment refrigerators in developing countries usually use kerosene, propane and to far lesser extent, solar power. Vital medicine is most often stored in unreliable kerosene refrigerators.
The SolarChill stores power generated by sunshine in an ice bank that can maintain vaccine compartment temperatures at WHO recommended level during periods when the sun is not shining for up to five days. The vaccine compartment temperature is self-regulated by thermal design, and does not rely on electronic control devices.
The big names moving to natural refrigerants
In the effort to reduce their carbon footprint and show environmental responsibility, several multinational corporations such as Coca Cola, Unilever, McDonald's, Carlsberg and PepsiCo have joined in the campaign Refrigerants, Naturally! which aims at replacing HCFCs and HFCs in their cooling equipment with natural refrigerants. A few examples of their initiatives:
- Pepsi has over 8000 vending machines around the world using hydrocarbons or CO2 technologies. About 5,000 of these are hydrocarbon units. The company has pioneered the testing of CO2 and hydrocarbon equipment in the United States. Starting in 2009, all new Pepsi coolers in Turkey are HFC-free.
- By 2009 Unilever had placed over 400,000 hydrocarbon ice-cream coolers around the world, including South Africa, China, Europe, Brasil and the United States. These coolers contain approximately 100 grams of hydrocarbons, and have a 9% energy savings over their HFC counterparts.
Converting from HCFCs to natural refrigerants
Hydrocarbons continue also to gain acceptance in commercial and mobile air-conditioning. They are widely accepted as nearly drop-in replacements for HCFC-22 in air-conditioning. Companies in the Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Jamaica and other countries have completed numerous conversions of R-22 installations to hydrocarbons with significant energy savings. These conversions of used equipment demonstrate that hydrocarbons can be safely applied, and should be an incentive to equipment manufacturers to produce new air conditioning units with propane and other hydrocarbons. The advantage of converting to hydrocarbon refrigerant is that it is environmentally friendly and little or no changes changes need to be made to the retrofitted air conditioning units.
GTZ Proklima, a German organisation working on reducing and phasing-out ozone depleting substances, has carried out several projects in developing countries, converting HCFC systems to ammonia. In Mauritius, CFC12 and CFC11 chillers catering for the air-conditioning needs of two government buildings were replaced with ammonia chillers in order to demonstrate the feasibility and enhanced energy efficiency of ammonia chillers in tropical climates. And in South Africa two HCFC22 stores are being converted to cascades systems with ammonia as the primary refrigerant.
Although HFC-free products are primarily used in industrialised countries for the present, they can be used worldwide. “Developing countries would benefit greatly by leap-frogging HFCs altogether [,] avoid reliance on more expensive, less efficient, HFCs that will need to be phased-out [and] escape the clutches of the fluorocarbon chemical industry’s monopoly over their choice of technology”, reads the report.
Greenpeace: COOL TECHNOLOGIES: WORKING WITHOUT HFCs - 2010: Examples of HFC-Free Cooling Technologies in Various Industrial Sectors
