The California Air Resource Board (CARB) enacted regulations on December 14 that are expected to significantly impact the supermarket and industrial refrigeration industry. These regulatory requirements on artificial refrigerants known as hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs are the most stringent implemented in the United States to date. Hillphoenix‘s portfolio of environmentally friendly products are designed to enable businesses to become compliant with these types of new regulations.
The new rules specifically affect commercial and industrial, stationary refrigeration units in California like the ones found in grocery stores and other food retail establishments. The regulations apply to new refrigeration equipment and retrofits and take effect at the beginning of January 2022.
“This landmark decision by CARB will have a lasting impact on the industry and likely have far-reaching influence on regulatory decisions across the United States and beyond, as requirements similar to California’s could potentially become the adopted standards,” stated Scott Martin, Director of Research, Industry Relations and Development, Dover Food Retail and Hillphoenix. “Hillphoenix, in keeping with the sustainability focus of our parent company Dover, is committed to developing products that help our customers meet their sustainability goals, run their operations more efficiently and satisfy evolving regulatory and environmental standards. With our leading portfolio of natural refrigeration solutions, Hillphoenix is well positioned to provide innovative and environmentally friendly products and an efficient path to compliance for our customers.”
Hillphoenix has invested in a broad portfolio of sustainable technologies and refrigeration solutions to satisfy the customer demand driven by evolving regulatory requirements, such as the new regulations in California. Investments include the acquisition of Advansor DE in Europe, a leader in carbon dioxide (CO2) technology research and development in sustainable refrigeration systems. Natural refrigeration solutions like CO2 have a lower global warming potential (GWP) than traditional artificial refrigerants. Hillphoenix recently opened a new facility dedicated to this business line that will be a springboard for CO2 leadership in Europe and North America. To date, Advansor has over 7,000 installations of CO2 systems in Europe.
“Advansor is a world leader in natural refrigeration technologies, and our technology uses CO2 in refrigeration to lessen the product’s contribution to global warming,” stated Kristian Breitenbauch, Managing Director, Advansor. “We are continuously innovating to improve environmental outcomes for our customers.”
U.S. manufacturing at Hillphoenix is focused on providing a wide variety of CO2 systems with North American installations exceeding 1,000 as many major retailers have committed to making the technology switch.
“Hillphoenix is a pioneer in designing environmentally sustainable refrigeration products for the industry,” said Martin. “With improvements in alternative refrigerants and energy efficiency, Hillphoenix has helped remove over 2.5 billion pounds of harmful emissions from customer operations in the last two decades and delivered thousands of natural refrigeration solutions to food retailers. We remain committed to supporting the reduction of harmful emissions to help our customers succeed in the marketplace and reduce their environmental burden.”
