Green Success Stories had a great conversation with Louis Potok, Co-Founder and CEO of Recoolit. We discussed the astounding greenhouse impact of refrigerant emissions, and Recoolit’s pioneering solution.
Tell us a bit about your sustainability journey.
In 2019 I was running the data science team at a San Francisco health tech startup. I was looking to get involved with climate change, and I started out by buying a copy of Project Drawdown to learn more about the space. I read about refrigerant management — their #1 listed solution — and was astonished that I had never heard of this massive source of emissions. (Refrigerants are super-potent greenhouse gases in every air conditioner and refrigerator on the planet, which are 2000x worse than CO2e pound-for-pound.) I started digging in, looking for companies addressing this problem, and trying to figure out if my skills as a technologist could make an impact. The more I learned, the more I realized that there were still huge gaps in the world’s efforts to address these problems.
After reading an immense amount and talking with dozens of experts, I realized that the biggest opportunity was to promote responsible refrigerant management in “Article 5 countries” — developing countries where the phasedown of superpolluting HFCs under the UN Montreal Protocol and Kigali Amendment will be extremely slow. Currently, in most of the world, HVAC technicians vent refrigerant from end-of-life devices every day, causing a total of 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2e of emissions yearly, or 6% of all human emissions.
South and Southeast Asia are regions where use of air conditioning is growing fast. In a warming world, access to cooling is a matter of public health, climate adaptation, and climate justice – people already die from heatstroke across the region and more air conditioning is needed. But the industry has to be made more sustainable, or we’ll just enter a vicious cycle where more air conditioners warm the planet, which leads to even more air conditioners.
I moved to Southeast Asia to learn more about the problem on the ground, and ended up starting Recoolit to address this problem in a hands-on way. We launched in Indonesia in 2021, and today have a team of 8 supporting a network of dozens of buildings and hundreds of technicians in their refrigerant management efforts.
Tell us a bit about the product or solution you offer.
Recoolit offers a pioneering solution to refrigerant emissions. We operate a network of third-party partners in Indonesia:
- HVAC technicians and facilities management teams access tools, training, and support for collecting harmful HFC gas from their cooling systems.
- We purchase back any waste gas from them, and dispose of it sustainably in a local licensed waste management facility.
- These activities are tracked on our proprietary software platform, which captures detailed evidence from every step of the journey.
- We then sell high-integrity carbon credits from the prevented emissions, using the data collected on our platform to generate a full digital audit trail.
- Our carbon credit customers can see the individual activities that led to their credit on a granular level — this is best-in-class functionality that no other carbon credit provider offers.
Share a green success story with us – how have you helped customers or other businesses in the fight against climate change?
We partnered with a shopping mall here in Indonesia during a retrofit project. They were replacing their chiller, looking for energy efficiency gains which could contribute to their bottom line and help reduce their energy consumption, in line with their internal sustainability goals. However, the used refrigerant from the old chiller would have caused 10x more emissions than they would have saved with the switch! They had no alternative for the used gas, and would likely have vented it into the atmosphere. We partnered with them to support their recovery process with specialized equipment and expertise, and transported the waste to our partner facility for disposal, helping support their sustainability goals.
On a different level, we are partnered with an Indonesia-wide professional association for freelance AC technicians, who are often informally educated and may earn less than minimum wage in any given month. We support several of their regional affiliates, promoting sustainability at their local events, and offering free training and use of tools for any potential refrigerant recovery project. Many of them have recovered refrigerant in small quantities to earn an incentive from us, and proudly display their certificates of participation in our program.
What would you do with $1 billion dollars?
I’d love to spend a big chunk of money on the refrigerant problem — from setting up treatment facilities and collection programs around the world, researching alternative zero- GWP refrigerants or new technologies not based on the vapor compression cycle, advocating for better policy in this area, and more. You could achieve a huge amount fighting refrigerant for well under a billion, so that leaves a lot to spend.
There are other “emergency brake” solutions where I’d love to see more funding, especially frontier solutions like research into solar radiation management and atmospheric methane removal.
Beyond climate altogether, I’m excited about Emergent Ventures style-grantmaking, totally unrestricted small grants to catalyze the ambitions of young high-achievers. There’s a lot of talent in the world, and often the constraints holding back major contributions to society are just a little bit of money and knowing that someone is believing in you.
What do you envision your industry looking like in ten years?
We’ll see a lot more sophistication and digital technology baked into building management and cooling devices. Sensors will be everywhere, tracking and actuating the real physical parameters of the system. More and more will be managed automatically, and this will be a huge help to making cooling sustainable by reducing energy use and preventing refrigerant emissions.
Kudos and Contact Information
Many thanks to Louis Potok and his team at Recoolit. Green Success Stories is happy to support and highlight their efforts! We invite readers to do the same.
- Louis can be reached directly at: louis@recoolit.com
- Read more about Recoolit on their website, at www.recoolit.com.
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