When last year Tesco, the UK supermarket chain, measured the carbon footprint of its operations it correctly guessed that the lion’s share of its greenhouse gas emissions would come from the power it used in lighting its store and powering its fridges. However, it was surprised to find that refrigerant use represented 19 per cent of the total.
“We wouldn’t have come up with a number that big,” says Katherine Symonds, sustainability manager at Tesco. “And one molecule of HFC [hydro-fluorocarbon] is 3,000 times more potent than one molecule of C02 as a greenhouse gas. So that was a surprising hot spot.”
