United States. Green America, the U.S. green economy organization, announced a new campaign to ask retailer Walmart to reduce its hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) emissions. The Cool It campaign urges Walmart to launch a detailed plan to eliminate HFCs at all locations, monitor and repair its refrigerant leaks, and practice responsible disposal.
The company's own data indicates that HFCs account for about 46 percent of the company's total direct emissions, according to the Carbon Disclosure Project.
"These potent greenhouse gases have an extremely high global warming potential and need to be addressed," said Beth Porter, Latin America's director of climate campaigns. "The energy equivalent of Walmart's annual HFC emissions would power nearly every household in San Francisco. It's an obvious source of the company's impact on the climate crisis and we're urging Walmart to take action."
In 2013, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) explicitly drew attention to Walmart's inaction on its refrigerant and HFC emissions practices in its report, The Dirty Dozen: How Its Local Supermarket Is Killing the Climate. Although Walmart launched targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through its highly publicized initiative, Project Gigaton, which aims to "avoid a gigaton of greenhouse gases" by incentivizing its suppliers to make changes, the company does not list a public target on direct HFC emissions despite having been aware of it. of the problem for years. In April 2019, EIA launched its Climate Friendly Supermarkets platform map to celebrate leaders on the topic (including Aldi, Whole Foods, and Target) showcasing each company's actions and why it makes business sense to move toward climate-friendly cooling.
"At a time of great need for climate action, Walmart, a company with a massive footprint and ample resources, continues to sleep as smarter companies rapidly adopt energy-efficient HFC-free technologies," said Avipsa Mahapatra. Leader of the Climate Campaign, EIA. "EIA joins Green America in once again calling on Walmart to stop relying on powerful super-polluting HFCs for refrigeration and demonstrate that the company's sustainability commitments are not just hollow words."
Project Drawdown identifies improved refrigerant management as the number one solution to reducing the greenhouse gases that cause the climate crisis. The EPA reports that a quarter of the refrigerants used in a typical store are filtered each year.
