Domestic Refrigeration
The shift to Cool Technologies began in the domestic refrigeration sector when in 1992-93 Greenpeace developed and helped commercialise hydrocarbon refrigerators using isobutane as the refrigerant and cyclopentane as the insulation foam blowing agent.
Greenpeace named this modern version of hydrocarbon refrigerators ‘Greenfreeze’ and made the technology freely available to the world. It is expected that the Greenfreeze technology will soon represent the majority of annual global domestic refrigeration production.
Using hydrocarbons can reduce energy consumption of domestic fridges by up to 15% compared to systems using fluorocarbons.