In response, Greenpeace launched a major campaign at the 2000 Sydney Olympics to expose how Coca-Cola’s HFC units were warming the planet.
Jacobs told me that Coca-Cola was “pretty dismissive,” largely because his team feared that these refrigeration units filled with flammable material might explode – especially in rural areas lacking technical support. These refrigerants, which had a global warming impact radically lower than HFCs, offered the prospect of protecting both the ozone layer and the climate. Greenpeace advocates in Germany had worked closely with refrigeration engineers to develop what came to be known as Greenfreeze cooling equipment: machines that used hydrocarbons, including isobutane and propane, as refrigerants. Bryan Jacobs, a Coca-Cola engineer who worked on this transition, told me in an interview that early on, refrigeration technicians in Europe recommended another promising path instead. HFC politicsĬompanies like Coca-Cola knew about HFCs’ climate-warming effects when they began transitioning to this new refrigerant in the 1990s. How refrigerants work and why they’re bad for the climate. Some HFCs had warming impacts more than 1,000 times greater than carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas. Like CFCs, HFCs appealed to industry because they were odorless, nonflammable and posed no serious threats to human health.īut HFCs had a big drawback: They were powerful greenhouse gases that trapped heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, warming the planet’s surface. Nations ultimately moved to ban use of CFCs through the 1987 Montreal Protocol, one of the most successful environmental treaties on record.Ĭhemical companies such as DuPont led the way in promoting new chlorine-free refrigerants, called hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs, that would not deplete the ozone layer.
Then, in the 1970s, researchers at the University of California found that CFCs could destroy stratospheric ozone, a gas in the atmosphere that protects life on Earth from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation.
In the following decades, CFCs became the chief refrigerant used to keep things cool. Discovered in the 1920s by a chemist at General Motors, these compounds were odorless, nonflammable and seemingly nontoxic – all properties that made them useful to industry. Before the 1980s, the primary coolants used in refrigerators were chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. Refrigerants first became an environmental issue because of concerns about ozone loss, not climate change.
#THE RUNNING CHALLENGE DRIVER#
In doing so, they have created a fast-paced, long-distance form of commerce that is a major driver of our planet’s current ecological crisis. That’s a heretical notion for a company obsessed with making sure Coca-Cola is always within “ an arm’s reach of desire,” as one Coke president put it.Īs I show in my new book, “ Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet,” major companies like Coca-Cola have profited handsomely by making their products readily available worldwide. History suggests that the most effective way to shrink Coca-Cola’s refrigeration emissions may be to question whether the company needs that cooling equipment running around the clock at convenience stores on street corners worldwide. South, like this gas station and post office in Sprott, Alabama, photographed in 1935. It started with outlets throughout the rural U.S. Coca-Cola’s marketing strategy emphasizes that a cold Coke should always be within reach.
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