
Ice cream lovers of the United States, rejoice. Greenpeace and Ben & Jerry’s have teamed up to bring the first climate-safe ice cream freezer to the USA. The Greenfreeze refrigerator eliminates the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), an extremely potent greenhouse gas that has 1,400 times the global warming impact of CO2.
Greenfreeze technology has been around since 1992 and is installed in over 300 million refrigerators worldwide. But it wasn’t allowed into the United States until earlier this year when the Environmental Protection Agency gave Ben & Jerry’s the go-ahead to test 2,000 Greenfreeze units.
HFCs and other fluorinated gases are the most dangerous greenhouse gases that you’ve probably never heard of. Together, they are responsible for 17 percent of global warming pollution in the atmosphere.
It’s sad that the USA has had to wait 16 years to receive such a widely-used technology, especially since Greenfreeze refrigerators make up 40 percent of all refrigerators produced worldwide each year. But with the US on board, perhaps that number will jump even higher.
Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!
Have a tip for CleanTechnica, want to advertise, or want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Electrifying Industrial Heat for Steel, Cement, & More
I don't like paywalls. You don't like paywalls. Who likes paywalls? Here at CleanTechnica, we implemented a limited paywall for a while, but it always felt wrong — and it was always tough to decide what we should put behind there. In theory, your most exclusive and best content goes behind a paywall. But then fewer people read it! We just don't like paywalls, and so we've decided to ditch ours. Unfortunately, the media business is still a tough, cut-throat business with tiny margins. It's a never-ending Olympic challenge to stay above water or even perhaps — gasp — grow. So ...