Recoolit’s software makes sustainability easy and profitable.
The cooling industry can lead the fight against climate change, but the status quo isn't working. Every day, super-potent refrigerant gases are vented from air conditioners around the world for lack of a better alternative. Recoolit's platform connects a network of technicians to offset buyers around the world, providing all the incentives and support to drive adoption of sustainable practices and reduce emissions.
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When an air conditioner is being serviced or reaches end-of-life, a technician reserves rental equipment from one of Recoolit’s convenient partner locations, and then recovers the waste gas into a reusable cylinder. They document the recovery with photos and videos, so we know where the gas is coming from and why it was recovered.
Full cylinders are scanned, loaded onto trucks, and taken to a storage facility where they are weighed, tested using a handheld analyzer, and consolidated into larger tanks. The empty cylinders are vacuumed out, checked for quality, and returned to the technicians for re-use.
Large tanks of gas are taken to a destruction facility in full compliance with local waste management regulations and international safety requirements. The refrigerant is tested again by an independent lab, ensuring that we know the exact global warming potential of every tank destroyed. The gas is then incinerated according to the UN’s technical standards, permanently preventing climate impact.
Every step in this process is tracked digitally on our platform, creating a robust audit trail backing our high-quality offsets. Purchasers can follow the gas from a device with a particular serial number, recovered by a particular technician with a specific recovery machine, through transport and consolidation, all the way to its destruction. Our unmatched transparency goes hand-in-hand with our best-in-class additionality and permanence.
Most discussions about climate change focus on carbon dioxide (CO2). But other greenhouse gases also contribute to the problem. The refrigerants used in cooling systems all over the world are powerful, thousands of times worse than CO2 on a pound-for-pound basis. All together these refrigerants (CFCs, HCFCs and HFCs) account for 1.1 billion tons of CO2-equivalent emission yearly, or about 2% of global climate change. This is about as much as the total emissions of Germany, the world’s 6th highest-emitting country.
The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol calls for a slow phasedown of the consumption and production of these gases, in favor of zero-GWP alternatives including natural refrigerants. But this will kick in slowly, especially in the hottest and fastest-growing (“Article 5”) countries where 5 billion new ACs will be sold by 2030.
When these devices reach end-of-life, they are usually scrapped for parts: the mechanical components can be reused or sold to scrap yards, and the refrigerant inside is treated as a waste product and pumped out. This also happens during maintenance. Emptying a big chiller and refilling with new gas in order to service it is usually easier and cheaper than holding onto the gas, because recovery is time-consuming and refillable cylinders are expensive and bulky.
The basic infrastructure to prevent refrigerant emissions already exists. But there are too many obstacles for the problem to solve itself: the cost and inconvenience of recovery, the lack of training around the world, and difficulty of enforcing anti-dumping regulations are all significant. The cooling industry needs support and incentives to become part of the solution, and that's where Recoolit comes in.