The refrigerants keeping food fresh...and warming the planet

Refrigerants are essential for the modern food industry. Aniqah Majid looks at the substances keeping food cool – and their climate impact

FOOD as we know it would be unrecognisable without refrigeration. From preservation to transportation, refrigerants are essential components for how farmers, food manufacturers and supermarkets produce food products – so much so that something as banal as a Tesco meal deal simply would not exist without them.

Refrigerants act as heat-transfer fluids within closed-loop thermodynamic systems. A liquid chemical compound absorbs heat from one location, releases it into the atmosphere as a gas and is then cooled and condensed back into a liquid so the process can begin again.

While the basic cooling process is similar across all refrigeration systems, multiple types of refrigerants can be used.

Currently, synthetic refrigerants are the most commonly used worldwide, particularly hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). However, their use is being phased down due to environmental concerns.

“From an engineering perspective, there’s no perfect refrigerant. Every single refrigerant has issues and it makes them all challenging,” says Greg Picker, executive director of Refrigerants Australia. Picker has worked in climate policy for more than 15 years, specialising in refrigerants and their use across cooling and heating systems.

As with PFAS, regulation has been developed to reduce the use of HFCs in refrigeration but alternatives carry their own risks and limitations.