Maintaining an ethos of efficiency without environmental cost, ammonia refrigeration systems provide excellent thermal characteristics, relatively low implementation costs and long system life for an extensive range of applications. Zero global warming potential, zero ozone depletion potential, and low operating pressures all combine to maintain ammonia’s place as the most popular industrial primary refrigerant.

For industrial scale installations, utilisation of ammonia systems provides outstanding energy performance for the end user without the highly detrimental impact on the environment which is common to most other synthetic refrigerants still in use today.

Recycling is a term most associated with the transformation of material waste from one form to a more useful one. Less commonly thought about is how we can implement these notions of recycling to our energy requirements. The principles of thermodynamics require heat transported away from the cold zone and disposed of elsewhere, most commonly to atmosphere.

Reclaiming the rejected from refrigeration plants for use other systems is simple to implement and can create large cumulative benefits, not just for the end use but also the community at large. For every watt of energy reclaimed is a reduction in fuel burnt which is a reduction in the amount of CO2 sent into our planet’s atmosphere.

Low-charge ammonia systems are refrigeration plants that use natural, environmentally friendly ammonia refrigerant in low volumes, as an alternative to existing hydro-fluorocarbons (HFCs). Along with the important environmental benefits of using ammonia in lieu of HFCs, low-charge ammonia technology can also provide performance improvements as well as lower ammonia inventory for reduced risk in the event of a leak.

In 2016, a historic agreement was made between 197 countries to limit the use of greenhouse gases and phase out HFCs worldwide. Known as the Kigali Amendment, this important change to the Montreal Protocol paved the way for a new era of industrial refrigeration by phasing down the environmentally unfriendly HFCs).