TWENTY-ODD years ago we never worried too much about refrigerants. Like fuel in a motor car, providing you put the right stuff in and it wasn’t horribly contaminated, your vehicle would run quite happily – at least until some crucial component expired. Then came the ozone layer and, later, global warming and suddenly the humble gas that is the lifeblood of all air conditioning and refrigeration was at the forefront of the environmental debate.
The CFCs have now long gone and HCFCs are on a short expiry date. The main debate now revolves around the differing advantages of fluorocarbons and the “natural” gases. The boffins, industrialists and environmentalists will continue to argue their respective cases but in the meantime the contractor/end-user must continue to keep his fridges cold and his offices cool with whatever the government heads of Europe deem acceptable.

In the meantime, spare a thought for the refrigerant repackager, the gas supplier who has to keep all sides happy.

Being the largest such operation in the UK with a 35% share of the estimated £40m market, BOC and its plant at Immingham feel the effects of the changes in the industry more than most.

It’s Immingham where, after a sizeable investment, in 2003, became the centre of the company’s refrigerant activities. This purpose-built, 10,000ft2 building contains storage vessels for the full range of refrigerants, state-of-the-art cylinder preparation and filling systems, analytical laboratory and refrigerant gas recycling machines.

The company has three main operations at Immingham: scientific gases, packaged chemicals and refrigerants. Of these, refrigerants is by far the largest part of the business. Here up to 120,000 cylinders are filled per year with 30 different products – HCFCs, HFCs, the R22 replacements as well as the “natural” refrigerants. The naturals are still a relatively small part of the business however – hydrocarbons and ammonia each comprise less than 10% of the business, with CO2 less than 1%.

Decline

But it’s not all sweetness and light in the gas business. Technological improvements to systems has minimised charges and increased legislation backed by an awareness of the need to prevent leaks has seen a decline in the market since 2000.

Recycling activities, however, are keeping BOC increasingly busy. Between May 2006 and June of this year, for instance, BOC handled 440 tonnes of waste refrigerant. Of this, 245 tonnes came from “fridge bashers” and 195 tonnes received from other channels/sources. Due to the fact that there is currently no way of separating cross-contaminated refrigerants a large amount of this gas has to be incinerated.

What might surprise many is the amount of refrigerant that has to be incinerated. Of the 440 tonnes mentioned, only 120 tonnes were recycled and that’s a figure that would be mirrored across the industry.

At the heart of BOC’s recycling activities is its agreement with US company Hudson Technologies and its cutting-edge equipment which includes recovery, reclaim, diagnostic, analytical and gas cleaning technology. Its recovery and recycling machine, aka the Zugebeast, has operated for over 1300 hours over the last four years and processed up to 400 tonnes of refrigerant and recovered five tonnes of oil.



Fully approved

Needless to say, BOC is fully approved and accredited to operate its facility. Cylinder preparation and testing is UKAS accredited and recovery operations are managed under Waste Management Licence and IPPC permit. Under the Waste regulations which came into force in July 2005, premises in England and Wales that produce waste must be registered with the Environment Agency as producers; companies that move waste must be licensed; details of the waste must travel with the waste; companies must be licensed to hold and store waste; companies processing waste must report their activities to the EA and any company accepting waste must report back to the producer of the waste as to what was done with it, ie recycled or destroyed. And the paperwork is mountainous: records need to be retained for three years including consignment notes; customers are legally required to keep their own records of where the waste material was produced. In fact, literally every molecule of refrigerant has to be accounted for.

BOC uses a system called Telequery to track ‘waste transactions. The data generated by the system forms part of the consignment note and thus allows BOC to track the product ‘from cradle to grave’.

Concern still exists over the industry’s continued reliance on R22 faced with an imminent phase-out. A little over two years from now – January 1 2010 to be precise – the use of virgin HCFC will be banned. Stockpiling is not an option so inevitably suppliers are going to run down stocks long before that date, increasing its scarcity and, inevitably, price.

Recycled and reclaimed material will still be able to be used until January 1 2015 but how much of this material will be available and at what cost? What to do? BOC will have the answer, contact them on 0800 02 0800.