Cooling chemicals are warming the planet
Tackling the overlooked climate problem in every air conditioner
Editor’s note: We supported Recoolit, a company capturing and destroying gases from air conditioners, with a pre-purchase through our revolving fund.
London had a heatwave during Climate Week last month, and the irony was not lost on those attending. But there’s an even deeper irony in the air conditioners that people switched on to cope. (And we’re not even talking about the fierce debate about the use of AC in Europe and the U.S.)
Those machines – ubiquitous in the U.S. and growing around the world – run on refrigerants called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. These man-made gases can trap hundreds to thousands of times more heat than carbon dioxide.
Refrigerants have garnered attention in recent years under the “superpollutants” label. In 2017, Project Drawdown – a go-to source for rankings of the most effective science-based solutions to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions – listed refrigerant management as the number one solution to the climate crisis. But action on refrigerant management has been slow to mobilize.
When Recoolit founder Louis Potok learned about the potential impact of removing superpollutants, he moved to Indonesia to be where the problem was acute. Rising temperatures and improving living standards are making air conditioning a staple, but the country has little infrastructure to safely dispose of HFCs. Louis found that technicians were venting gas from old machines into the air as standard practice, because there was no alternative.
Since 2021, his team has been working to make cooling sustainable around the world.
What’s actually inside your AC, and what it takes to destroy it
Air conditioners and refrigerators work by cycling refrigerants, chemicals that evaporate and condense to absorb and release heat. Sealed inside a machine, they’re harmless. The problem starts when the equipment undergoes routine maintenance or end-of-life disposal, which releases the refrigerants into the air. These refrigerants are responsible for the equivalent of over 3 billion tons (gigatons) of carbon dioxide emissions each year.
While prohibitions on venting exist in different countries, enforcement is nearly impossible.
In most of the world, the infrastructure to capture and destroy that gas at a meaningful scale simply doesn’t exist, and the destruction process relies on high-temperature incineration at facilities that are limited in number due to cost and strict permitting.
Recoolit’s process
Recoolit built the infrastructure that’s missing elsewhere: local technicians, regional consolidation, and certified destruction, all tracked end to end. The process runs in four stages:
Stage 1: Technicians recover refrigerant waste from household and commercial units into reusable cylinders.
Stage 2: The cylinders go to a Recoolit warehouse, where they’re weighed, tested, and consolidated into larger tanks.
Stage 3: The gas is destroyed at a partner facility, fully compliant with local regulations and UN technical standards.
Stage 4: Every step is tracked digitally, creating a full chain of custody from a specific device to destruction.
Check the sticker inside your fridge door. If it says R-134a, that refrigerant traps 1,430 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 100-year window. When Recoolit destroys it through high-temperature incineration, the warming potential drops from 1,430 to one. What goes in as a potent greenhouse gas comes out as carbon dioxide, water, and – once the acid gas is scrubbed – a stable salt.
Multiplied across the estimated 550 million AC units that will be sold in Indonesia between 2022 and 2060, the climate impact is massive.
The more difficult problems: operations, protocols, and funding
Louis will tell you that destruction isn’t the hard part. It’s everything that comes before it: building a collection network, training technicians to capture gas instead of venting it, and developing the protocols that let that work generate verified carbon credits.
When Recoolit completed its first destructions in 2022, it hit a wall. Existing carbon credit methodologies covered older refrigerants like CFCs and HCFCs, but not HFCs. Existing registries weren’t interested in updating these little-used methodologies without proof of large credit supply and robust buyer demand – a classic chicken-and-egg problem.
Without a methodology, Recoolit couldn’t issue credits for the emissions reductions from gas it was destroying for nearly three years. It had to spin up an internal registry and find catalytic early buyers like Wren who were willing to take risks and move faster than the legacy market infrastructure. This allowed Recoolit to survive and keep growing until the market evolved.
Things shifted when Google signed a major offtake agreement with Recoolit, providing capital to scale Indonesia operations and plan expansion into other countries. At the same time, Isometric was developing their new HFC-specific methodology. The missing and fragmented infrastructure was starting to come together.
Recoolit’s goal: keep the equivalent of 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by 2050.
Why Terraset got involved
The climate crisis operates on multiple timescales at once. Carbon removal addresses what’s already in the atmosphere. Superpollutant mitigation stops gases with greater warming potential before they’re released.
Terraset made a pre-purchase from Recoolit in 2025 as part of our expansion into superpollutant mitigation alongside our carbon removal portfolio. That funding let the Recoolit team buy cylinders, pay for gas collection, hire field staff, and pay themselves.
Your air conditioner is keeping you cool this summer. What happens to it when it’s done matters more than most people realize. Organizations like Recoolit are building the systems to make sure it doesn’t warm the planet on its way out.
If you want your dollars working on multiple timescales at once, this is what it looks like. Get in touch at hello@terrasetclimate.org.