Your old fridge may be hiding climate-warming chemicals

Old beer fridges can contain refrigerant that has climate warming chemicals in them. (Unsplash: A bicycle and other items rest in a weathered enclosure, Andy Bodemer) Link copiedShareShare articleA few weeks ago, my mum asked me to help get rid of the "beer fridge" in her garage. This old, yellowing piece of equipment was the first fridge my parents bought when they moved in 1998. Almost 30 years later, it seemed to still be going strong. But this trusty fridge had an environmentally damaging secret. Like many old fridges, it contained a cooling fluid made with hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). While HFCs can help keep your milk and cheese cold, they can also be a big problem for global warming as your fridge gets older and leakier. Most people don't really know it's a problem with their refrigerators, according to chemical physicist Christopher Hansen at the University of New South Wales. That means getting rid of an old fridge isn't simply a case of dumping it in a landfill, but depending on where you live in Australia it's not always simple to find an alternative option or a free one. Fridges and other white goods didn't always contain HFCs. They used to contain chloroflurocarbons (CFCs). But back in the 70s, it was discovered that CFCs were destroying our ozone layer. These gases were banned internationally, and their concentration in the atmosphere has begun to decrease in recent years. Manufacturers began using other synthetic refrigerants, eventually replacing CFCs with HFCs in the 1990s. These shiny new HFC refrigerants were stable, they didn't destroy the ozone layer, and, like CFCs, they mostly weren't flammable — meaning they were still safe for technicians to use and install. But it was discovered in the 2010s that HFCs were also potent greenhouse gases. In 2016, an international agreement was made to phase down the production and use of HFCs. For the countries that agreed, there are increasing limitations on how much HFC-based refrigerant they can produce and, for countries like Australia, how much they can bulk-import. But this only applies to in gas cylinders — under the agreement, countries don't need to ban or limit the imports of equipment containing these refrigerants. While many newer refrigerators use non-HFC gases like isobutane, some refrigerators on the market may still use HFCs. Australia has begun to ban some appliances, such as small split air conditioners that use certain HFC-based refrigerants. The agreement also doesn't address what to do with appliances containing HFCs once they no longer work. "If we didn't do anything about [limiting HFC usage], we were going to increase the temperature of the world by between a quarter and half a degree this century, just from HFCs," Dr Hansen said. If you want to know whether your beer fridge or a fridge you're interested in purchasing uses HFCs, the appliance's manual or online specifications will often list the refrigerant used. On the fridge itself, these specification plates or stickers can be on the door, on the inside wall of the refrigerator, or at the back of the fridge, where it will list a refrigerant number beginning with "R". From there, you can find what's inside the refrigerant by looking at the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment, and Water's hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants guide. There are about 15 different HFC chemicals on the list, such as HFC-134a, and a further 70 or so HFC blends. Look to see if your fridge uses non-HFCs listed in the guide, such as R-600a (isobutane), instead of HFC-134a. Even though new equipment is increasingly being manufactured without HFC refrigerants, HFCs are still being emitted from appliances that contain them today. Take the refrigerant — HFC-134a — that was used in my mum's old refrigerator and other appliances like air conditioners. It's the most abundant HFC in the atmosphere, according to Paul Krummel, an atmospheric scientist at the CSIRO. "You can see it's just skyrocketing," he said. Over the lifetime of an appliance, it will start to break down and leak, meaning that by the time it reaches its end of life, in about 15 to 20 years, only around 20 per cent of its refrigerant remains. That 20 per cent can still be captured in a gas cylinder by qualified refrigerant technicians, without leaking into the atmosphere, if the appliance is disposed of correctly. Australia does have a program — called the refrigerant gas product stewardship scheme — that aims to recover these refrigerants before they completely leak into the atmosphere. The scheme is run by Refrigerant Reclaim Australia (RRA), and according to the group's general manager Kylie Farrelley, it requires anyone seeking to profit from the sale of refrigerants to also facilitate their responsible capture. Equipment owners can be anyone: people like my mum, who owns domestic fridges, or companies that own property with big air conditioning systems. In Australia, anyone decommissioning appli

Your old fridge may be hiding climate-warming chemicals

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Your old fridge may be hiding climate-warming chemicals

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