The race against superheating gases

The secret sauce inside of this heat pump, your  fridge, and air conditioner is the refrigerant that circulates inside compressing and expanding  to move heat from one space to another. But if this chemical escapes it's a problem because it heats  the atmosphere much more than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. So when an appliance dies or  reaches the end of its life cycle, the refrigerant is hopefully recovered into canisters. But those  often get left around to degrade and leak. "And now

we have a little hole there that you cannot  see but there's actually gas coming out slowly. Right now I can smell it. But this is just what  happens when these cylinders are sitting here for so long. There's about 13 out of the 500 that  are empty completely empty we can see the rust here." Few people understand how big of a disaster  it is when this happens. Luckily the most potent warming gases are no longer being produced or  are being phased down. But because there's no easy way to properl

y dispose of it there are many  millions of appliances and tanks full of it still out out there. Fortunately one company has made  it their mission to hunt down these canisters - these climate grenades - and safely disarm them. To  learn more I visited their home base in Chicago. There's no regulatory obligation to destroy  this stuff and that's a role we can come in and help fill. We'll store these by the different  refrigerant types. So this one's all of the R-502. We ship out boxes, you put y

our material in, and then they get mailed back to us. These little labels show us, on the back end,  it identifies on the tank level exactly what each of these tanks are. Valeria leads a team that  travels Across America finding refrigerants and paying people cash for them. She took me  along on a quick local pickup. So we mostly are purchasing CFCs so that's R-11, R-12, R-113, R-114, R-500. We, as of this year, started also purchasing HCFCs like R-22 and R-502 .We plan our trips around the  n

umber of pounds that we're looking to collect and the type of refrigerant we're buying. It's  folks driving around regionally and shipping the material back. Or flying into a major city,  doing a pickup, shipping it out, and then flying back home. We have a lot of folks that try and  treat this as, frankly, like a retirement savings thing. They think it's liquid gold  and they're just hoarding this material for years and years. They're buying it from neighbors?  Neighbors, on Craigslist, Faceboo

k Marketplace, garage sales, car shows. Essentially how it works is  a bunch of people with old cars will come together and they'll come with material to sell  to each other, and at like a pretty penny. And eventually they realize I no longer need  this need this, or they pass away. We've had clients' families reach out. 'I remember  my husband or my brother - whoever - was talking to you all about selling this refrigerant and he  just refused and he is no longer here.' We should be here in a se

cond. We didn't want to freak  the customer out by filming them in front of their house, but back at the warehouse I saw the goods.  Dupont Freon 12. It's funny because you can see here this is a K-mart label. So this guy - or  whoever he got it from - at some point got this can for $4.25 cents over in Kmart. And  there's an old 2008, maybe. Or August, 1982. Who knows! Inside, I found Moises working on the next  step. So here we have one. I'm going to make sure it's at zero on our weight scale.

And then before  we fill it, I want to make sure that it is R-12. Don't want to mix our refrigerants. This device here  basically tells us what type of refrigerant is in the cylinder itself. So it's testing so we can  see our results. R-12 100%. So they all varying sizes... The team stores the refrigerants in these larger  tanks until they've aggregated enough to fill this beast. So that can hold up to 30,000 33,000 lb of  refrigerant. Wow! That's the megaload. That thing needs a police escort

going through. At the end of  the year we've probably done like maybe four or five of these. Destruction happens at a facility  like this one, that superheats the refrigerant. The most common destruction method that we've  used involves rotary kill and incineration. We are literally burning this gas to break down the  chemical bonds and rendering the component parts essentially inert. When I sat down with Tradewater's  Founders at Jackson Park, I learned that this whole Operation started on a mu

ch smaller scale. I started  researching a little bit and found on eBay that one could buy old refrigerants, particularly  the really potent stuff, otherwise known as R-12. So I bought it. And it was an interesting  and exciting moment to think 'well there's an elegant form of pollution prevention,  you can simply buy it.' And I bought more and more of it. Come 2013, I was able to figure out  how to get it destroyed and credited in the California program and then sold as carbon  offset credits.

And that's what really started the whole adventure. Most of the other people who  were doing this work were refrigerant people who are handling refrigerants, selling refrigerant,  cleaning and reusing refrigerant. And then the carbon protocols came out and they realized there  was money to be made if they destroyed some of it, and so they do it on the side as a supplement. But  you came from an environmental background, and the mission of tradewater was to think climate  first. But if you think

about what it started with that first 50,000 ton of impacts of CO2  equivalent. Now we've done 6.2 million tons and we're on track to do 22 million tons over the next  5 years. Some of the recent estimates say that, if you look at the generation of gases that have high  global warming potential, there's about 90 billion tons of CO2 equivalent that have been - and will  be - produced before we completely phase out the production of these harmful gases. We've done 6.2  million tons of CO2e--it's a

drop in the bucket of what the world needs to do. With its US operation  set up and scaling quickly, the team is working internationally to make an even bigger impact. But  that comes with some serious challenges. In every country that we start to identify refrigerants  that we want to collect and move for shipment, you have to go through a similar process that took  us years in the US to get right. So when you go to Ghana the rules are different than when you're  in Honduras, which are differe

nt than when you go to Thailand. If you're in Thailand you're  destroying in Thailand, so that's a different system. If you're in Honduras you're destroying  in France. In the US it's one thing, right? It's a developed country with an infrastructure for  recycling, recovery, and reclamation of these gases. When we go around the world, these are  the technicians who come out when you are either getting rid of a system at end-of-life, or when  you need to repair it. You have to have certain equipm

ent to recover the gas when you fix  a system so it doesn't leak out as you open it up, and to then store the gas. And not everybody has  that equipment, and it's expensive. And even those who have the equipment, and will go through  the process of recovering gas into a tank, if they don't have something to do with the gas that  they collect, it gets full. And they say can you take this? Can you destroy this? Can you get rid  of it? And if there's no destruction technology or no recycling techno

logy in a country - which is  true in many parts of the world - they fill up the cylinder, that's their only cylinder, and then they  go back to releasing it into the atmosphere. And so as we think about expanding this work and  doing it well, it is about training. It's about investing in these communities to give them the  equipment. And most importantly, it's making sure that those who go through the trouble of doing  the right thing can have that cylinder emptied, that gas destroyed, and they

get their cylinder  back to keep going. Back in the US, Tradewater is partnering with state governments to stop another  dangerous gas from leaking: the methane spewing out of millions of uncapped oil and gas wells,  emissions that have a warming potential 81.2 times that of CO2 over a 20-year period. The team  is leveraging the skills of former oil and gas industry workers who get this specialized job  done right. Once production ceased and it's no longer economic, the well should have been ta

ken  apart and plugged properly. That is pull all the tubing out of the hole, put a plug down in the  bottom of the hole, and then fill that hole with cement. Cut everything off here and there would be  absolutely nothing out here in this farmer's field anymore. They were supposed to be plugged by  the people who drilled them. And often times the people that drilled them either they went bankrupt,  became insolvent in some way, essentially took off and left these wells on landowners properties 

without a real solution. I look at these millions of wells, we wanted to understand 'how many of  these are leaking?' Quickly discovered it was the majority of the wells. These gases cannot be  sequestered or pulled from the atmosphere once released. So there's a lot of interesting projects to preserve trees and soil as well as all the carbon capture technology. That will bring  CO2 out of the atmosphere, but it will not bring refrigerants or methane out of the atmosphere.  To support their work

and help it get done even faster you can voluntarily offset your own  emissions through the link below like I did for this trip. It's surprisingly affordable. Thanks  for watching. Make sure you're subscribed here to catch the next climate solution I profile. [Shivers] Now  I'm going inside to enjoy my nice warm heat pump.