Analysis of Reported European Emissions Shows Improvement in Containment of Hydrofluorocarbons

banks ABSTRACT: Hydrofluorocarbons are greenhouse gases with high Global Warming Po-tentials that are mainly used in refrigeration and air conditioning. Historically, they were emitted only slowly from such systems and long term containment remains an important engineering and environmental issue. As part of their commitment under the Rio Convention, nations are required to report annual calculated production and emissions of all greenhouse gases and the reports sub-mitted by European countries have been examined to determine the extent to which con-tainment of HFCs (expressed as the rate of emission from the bank remaining in equip-ment) has changed with time. Although there is wide variation between countries, the annual emission rates of HFCs have improved significantly over the past ten years and now represent between 5 and 10 % of the bank still contained in equipment. This implies that, at the present state of technology, it would take at least 10 to 20 years for the origi-nal mass of refrigerant charged into a system to be released into the atmosphere.