Almcoe Refrigeration is the first commercial refrigeration contractor to adopt EOS Climate’s Refrigeration Asset System (RAS), which treats refrigerants as assets.
Refrigerants, which are thousands of times more potent greenhouse gases than CO2, are often released into the atmosphere due to improper handling of refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment at end-of-life.
The RAS provides refrigerant-intensive industries, such as supermarkets, hotels and manufacturers of refrigeration and HVAC equipment as well as their service contractors, with ways to manage refrigerants as assets and decide when to invest in their conservation and maintenance or monetize them when they have reached the end of their useful life.
The system deploys integrated barcode scanning technology across the refrigerant value chain to track every pound of refrigerant, from the point of purchase through the end of life. Deployed at scale, RAS can prevent millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from reaching the atmosphere, EOS Climate says.
After conducting a beta test of RAS in 2013, Almcoe began rolling out the system to its team of refrigeration technicians this year. The company is using the system to track its refrigerant inventory, reduce loss, manage distribution of refrigerants to supermarket customers, provide leak data for EPA compliance reporting, and capture value from refrigerant assets for itself and its customers.
Earlier this month Jaco Environmental integrated RAS across all 27 of its appliance de-manufacturing facilities in the US. At the time, the companies said this created the world’s first transparent, cradle-to-cradle solution for refrigerants recovered from residential appliances and vending machines.