United States. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a final rule to establish a new program to better manage, recycle, and reuse climate-damaging hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), in compliance with the American Manufacturing and Innovation Act (AIM).
The final rule includes provisions that will reduce leaks from large refrigeration and air conditioning equipment and support U.S. leadership and innovation in developing clean solutions to address these heat-trapping emissions.
Today's final rule, which establishes the Emissions Reduction and Recovery (ER&R) program, addresses the third part of the bipartisan AIM Act, and comes less than two years after President Biden signed the U.S. ratification of the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to phase out climate-damaging HFCs and help avoid up to 0.5 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2100.
By reducing leakage and promoting innovative reuse of existing HFCs, this final rule will help the nation achieve an 85% HFC phase-down by 2036, while boosting American leadership and competitiveness.
The ER&R program will help minimize HFC emissions from equipment by addressing leaks throughout the life of refrigerant-containing equipment such as air conditioners and refrigeration systems, while maximizing the reuse of existing HFCs, supporting a growing U.S. industry to recover HFCs from existing equipment and recover them for use again, all while reducing lifecycle emissions. Earlier this year, EPA announced the recipients of grants for President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act funding to support American innovation in HFC recovery.
The final ER&R program includes requirements to repair leaking equipment, the installation and use of automatic leak detection systems in large refrigeration systems, the use of recovered HFCs to service certain existing equipment, the minimization of HFC emissions from firefighting equipment, the training of firefighting technicians and the removal of HFCs from disposable cylinders before they are discarded. The regulations also set a standard that limits the amount of new or virgin HFCs that can be contained in recovered HFC refrigerants. In addition, EPA is establishing alternative standards under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act for flammable used refrigerants when recycled for reuse.
EPA estimates that, in addition to the benefits of the above HFC measures, between 2026 and 2050, this standard will provide additional cumulative greenhouse gas emissions reductions of approximately 120 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, an incremental net benefit of at least $6.9 billion.
