OUR STORY |
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Left to right: Neil Schill (Sustainable Tompkins), Tilden Chao, Abigail Glickman, Gay Nicholson (advisor). Photo: Gertrude Noden (Global Education Motivators)
In early February 2018, Sustainable Tompkins, a climate-action group, organized its Youth Climate Challenge, an initiative for middle school and high school students to combat climate change. Dr. Tim Harris, a physician in Tompkins County, generously donated $5000 to fund student-run projects.
While researching possibilities at home, Tilden began to learn about the dangers of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants, chemicals thousands of times worse for the atmosphere than carbon dioxide and methane. In the climate conversation today, we give so much attention to carbon dioxide and methane, but almost never properly address the threat of HFCs. According Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, refrigerant containment has the greatest potential to slow atmospheric warming of any climate-related issue. Luckily, the international community has a plan to make this assertion a reality. In 2016, the United Nations ratified the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, a landmark bill to ban HFCs on an international scale. But even with this legislation, stringent laws will take years to come into effect. In the United States, our government seems to be stalling on Kigali ratification--we might never see these laws hit American soil.
A month after Sustainable Tompkins opened the Youth Climate Challenge, we founded Keep it Cool, Tompkins!, a student-run organization dedicated to mitigating the effects of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) gas in our home of Tompkins County, New York. Tilden wrote an initial grant proposal, and together, we received $990 to fund our work. Our project has two main goals: containing HFC refrigerants in existing refrigerators and simplifying the transition to alternative refrigerants in the private sector. Throughout this project, our overarching motive is to educate the community and businesses about the threats of HFC.
The statistics on supermarket refrigeration are just staggering. According to the EPA, most supermarkets use R-404A, a refrigerant with a
global warming potential 3920 times greater than carbon dioxide. In any American supermarket, you can find upwards of 3,500 pounds of R-404A! Pursuant to American environmental regulations, supermarket chillers can legally have a leak rate of 25 percent, meaning that about 875 pounds of refrigerant can legally escape into the atmosphere every year. Those emissions are equivalent to 3,431,400 pounds (1715 tons) of carbon dioxide. Given that the average car emits about six tons of carbon dioxide each year, the radiative force (effect on global warming) of the average American supermarket is equivalent to emissions from 286 cars. That's insane!
Since the spring, we've been building our website to serve as an educational tool to help consumers and businesses learn about alternatives to HFC and the potential phase-out of HFC. The largest component of our work deals with networking with HVAC experts and key stakeholders in our community. Over the last few months, we have established friendships with the GreenChill program from the EPA, Wegmans Food Markets, Ithaca Bakery, and sustainability directors for the Town and City of Ithaca. In early 2019, we will host a regional refrigeration summit to educate experts and community members about the harms of HFC.
At the end of the day, this isn't just about the technical aspects of refrigeration and climate change. Instead, we're trying to build a community founded on a common vision for sustainable refrigeration.
We hope you enjoy our site!
Tilden Chao and Abigail Glickman
Ithaca High School '19
Ithaca, New York
While researching possibilities at home, Tilden began to learn about the dangers of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants, chemicals thousands of times worse for the atmosphere than carbon dioxide and methane. In the climate conversation today, we give so much attention to carbon dioxide and methane, but almost never properly address the threat of HFCs. According Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, refrigerant containment has the greatest potential to slow atmospheric warming of any climate-related issue. Luckily, the international community has a plan to make this assertion a reality. In 2016, the United Nations ratified the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, a landmark bill to ban HFCs on an international scale. But even with this legislation, stringent laws will take years to come into effect. In the United States, our government seems to be stalling on Kigali ratification--we might never see these laws hit American soil.
A month after Sustainable Tompkins opened the Youth Climate Challenge, we founded Keep it Cool, Tompkins!, a student-run organization dedicated to mitigating the effects of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) gas in our home of Tompkins County, New York. Tilden wrote an initial grant proposal, and together, we received $990 to fund our work. Our project has two main goals: containing HFC refrigerants in existing refrigerators and simplifying the transition to alternative refrigerants in the private sector. Throughout this project, our overarching motive is to educate the community and businesses about the threats of HFC.
The statistics on supermarket refrigeration are just staggering. According to the EPA, most supermarkets use R-404A, a refrigerant with a
global warming potential 3920 times greater than carbon dioxide. In any American supermarket, you can find upwards of 3,500 pounds of R-404A! Pursuant to American environmental regulations, supermarket chillers can legally have a leak rate of 25 percent, meaning that about 875 pounds of refrigerant can legally escape into the atmosphere every year. Those emissions are equivalent to 3,431,400 pounds (1715 tons) of carbon dioxide. Given that the average car emits about six tons of carbon dioxide each year, the radiative force (effect on global warming) of the average American supermarket is equivalent to emissions from 286 cars. That's insane!
Since the spring, we've been building our website to serve as an educational tool to help consumers and businesses learn about alternatives to HFC and the potential phase-out of HFC. The largest component of our work deals with networking with HVAC experts and key stakeholders in our community. Over the last few months, we have established friendships with the GreenChill program from the EPA, Wegmans Food Markets, Ithaca Bakery, and sustainability directors for the Town and City of Ithaca. In early 2019, we will host a regional refrigeration summit to educate experts and community members about the harms of HFC.
At the end of the day, this isn't just about the technical aspects of refrigeration and climate change. Instead, we're trying to build a community founded on a common vision for sustainable refrigeration.
We hope you enjoy our site!
Tilden Chao and Abigail Glickman
Ithaca High School '19
Ithaca, New York
FUNDING OVERVIEW |
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Project Name
Keep It Cool, Tompkins! The Future of Refrigeration
Purpose of the Grant
This grant will allow high school students to stimulate community awareness around containment and reduction of hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants (HFCs), which have a greenhouse gas effect up to 23,000 times that of carbon dioxide.
What are the project goals and how will you reduce CO2 emissions or spread awareness of local climate impacts?
Our project will center around a professional and informative website, which we will vigorously promote and distribute in our community and around the world. In addition, in order to make sure businesses are anticipating incoming changes to refrigeration, we hope to hold a refrigeration summit in Ithaca. At this refrigeration summit, we hope to have local businesses sign a pledge, either to become early adopters of HFC alternatives, or to be conscious and compliant to maintenance best practices. We'll primarily serve local businesses that are heavily reliant on refrigeration, like supermarkets, restaurants, and food distributors. More broadly, of course, this project serves the general public by working to mitigate climate change.
Our website, which will advocate for early adoption and alternatives to HFC and reference refrigerator maintenance best practices, will serve as the main research component of our project. In the research, writing, and information that we post to our website, we hope to condense the most important points into a large poster that can be used as a visual in presentations.
Next, we plan to conduct thorough outreach to companies around our community, and learn what their standard practices are and if they are anticipating changes brought by the Kigali Amendment. We will recommend alternatives to HFC in an attempt to promote early adoption.
By establishing business connections in the community, we hope to hold a small regional refrigeration summit in Ithaca. First, our group will give a presentation about our project goals and impact until that point. Then, we hope to invite multiple experts on the issue to give a presentation about refrigerants, best practices, and potential alternatives to HFC for early adopters.
Proposed Project Tasks, Work Plan, and Timeline
This section of our grant proposal is relatively fluid. For example, we aren't constraining research to only certain dates, and we plan to continually add to our website as we go along.
Measuring and Evaluating Results
Quantitatively, we hope to report the total number of unique visitors to our website and publish general website demographics from optional surveys on our website asking for age, ethnicity, and business type. We will then put these demographics into a chart, where we can assess how well we conducted outreach to a variety of individuals and interest groups.
Using graphing tools, we will extrapolate the impact early adopters and followers of maintenance best practices could have over the next few years. The mathematical model that we create will be published on our website and sent to our partners.
On a qualitative level, we hope to have a thorough response form on paper and electronically at our summit and on our website. This form will allow people to send us feedback about what we did well and what we could change about our project. We will also have survey questions that address the significance and quality of the climate issue we tackled.
On the whole, we will have our local business contacts submit in writing the changes they plan to make in their own refrigeration systems, including changes they have observed in their climate impact. Using this information, we can gauge the total impact of our outreach and advocacy for environmentally friendly refrigeration practices.
Keep It Cool, Tompkins! The Future of Refrigeration
Purpose of the Grant
This grant will allow high school students to stimulate community awareness around containment and reduction of hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants (HFCs), which have a greenhouse gas effect up to 23,000 times that of carbon dioxide.
What are the project goals and how will you reduce CO2 emissions or spread awareness of local climate impacts?
Our project will center around a professional and informative website, which we will vigorously promote and distribute in our community and around the world. In addition, in order to make sure businesses are anticipating incoming changes to refrigeration, we hope to hold a refrigeration summit in Ithaca. At this refrigeration summit, we hope to have local businesses sign a pledge, either to become early adopters of HFC alternatives, or to be conscious and compliant to maintenance best practices. We'll primarily serve local businesses that are heavily reliant on refrigeration, like supermarkets, restaurants, and food distributors. More broadly, of course, this project serves the general public by working to mitigate climate change.
Our website, which will advocate for early adoption and alternatives to HFC and reference refrigerator maintenance best practices, will serve as the main research component of our project. In the research, writing, and information that we post to our website, we hope to condense the most important points into a large poster that can be used as a visual in presentations.
Next, we plan to conduct thorough outreach to companies around our community, and learn what their standard practices are and if they are anticipating changes brought by the Kigali Amendment. We will recommend alternatives to HFC in an attempt to promote early adoption.
By establishing business connections in the community, we hope to hold a small regional refrigeration summit in Ithaca. First, our group will give a presentation about our project goals and impact until that point. Then, we hope to invite multiple experts on the issue to give a presentation about refrigerants, best practices, and potential alternatives to HFC for early adopters.
Proposed Project Tasks, Work Plan, and Timeline
This section of our grant proposal is relatively fluid. For example, we aren't constraining research to only certain dates, and we plan to continually add to our website as we go along.
- Research: In our research stage, spanning from May 1 to June 15, we will reach out to professionals and thoroughly explore the political, economic, and environmental complexities of the HFC phase-out. We also will conduct market and quantitative research and extrapolate the projected impact on global warming transition from HFCs in terms of a carbon dioxide equivalent.
- Website and poster development: Our website, developed using the Weebly program, will provide comprehensive descriptions of best practices and alternatives to HFC. Moreover, we will quantitatively represent the potential impact early adoption and compliance with maintenance best practices could have on the environment. This stage will occur from June 16 to July 10.
- Local outreach: This component of the project will occur after our website is fully developed. We hope to reach out to representatives from Wegmans, Tops, Green Star, Ithaca Beer Company, dairies, and smaller local businesses reliant on refrigeration around our area.
- Summit planning and scheduling: We will plan our summit in early 2019. This will include sending letters to potential summit speakers and reserving a conference room for our meeting. We will also extend invitations to local businesses with whom we have connected, and spread the word on social media.
- Press release and advertisement: Prior to our summit, we will publish a press release in local and regional newspapers about our goals and impact up until that point in our project. We will also ask local news stations to attend our meeting. This will be done throughout our summit planning stage.
- Summit: We hope to engage with representatives from at least 15 local businesses on the topic of refrigeration and the HFC phase-out. Our summit will begin with a presentation from our group—the students—and will be followed with a presentation and panel from adult experts in refrigeration and climate change. This summit will occur in late July or early August, depending on our personal schedules and space availability.
- Local outreach and press release: In the week following our summit, we will publish a press release and continue outreach in the community. Until our summit, we will meet with companies that did not attend the summit and extend the same pledges and ideas to them.
- Tracking and evaluation: After our summit, we will vigorously promote our website and materials, and track the progress of our contacts in local businesses who agreed to maintenance practices or early adoption. We hope to quantitatively assess our businesses, and estimate the significance of their efforts on global climate change.
- Final presentation: From our summit to the informal end of our project, we will reflect on the impact of our project and assemble new posters and a PowerPoint presentation. We will also quantitatively analyze the total impact of our project and the number of people that we reached.
Measuring and Evaluating Results
Quantitatively, we hope to report the total number of unique visitors to our website and publish general website demographics from optional surveys on our website asking for age, ethnicity, and business type. We will then put these demographics into a chart, where we can assess how well we conducted outreach to a variety of individuals and interest groups.
Using graphing tools, we will extrapolate the impact early adopters and followers of maintenance best practices could have over the next few years. The mathematical model that we create will be published on our website and sent to our partners.
On a qualitative level, we hope to have a thorough response form on paper and electronically at our summit and on our website. This form will allow people to send us feedback about what we did well and what we could change about our project. We will also have survey questions that address the significance and quality of the climate issue we tackled.
On the whole, we will have our local business contacts submit in writing the changes they plan to make in their own refrigeration systems, including changes they have observed in their climate impact. Using this information, we can gauge the total impact of our outreach and advocacy for environmentally friendly refrigeration practices.