This basic kitchen appliance is destroying the planet

According to the BBC, the cooling industry accounts for around 10% of global CO2 emissions, three times the amount produced by aviation and shipping combined. That includes appliances like air-conditioners as well as industrial and home refrigerators.

According to data gathered by Statista, the refrigerator world market is worth 108.5 billion dollars. Unit sales are projected to reach 195 million between 2012 and 2025, with a steady yearly increase.

It is no surprise that the industry is significant. Home refrigerating changed the production, packaging, distribution, retailing, purchasing, and consumption of food. They also made the transportation of vital medicine, like vaccines and antibiotics, simple.

Refrigerators transfer heat from inside to outside. That is how they keep things cool. For this, they use condensers, compressors, and coils filled with gases called refrigerants that are constantly moving inside their walls.

However, while refrigerators might have made storing food so much more convenient and safer, they are bad for the environment for two main reasons: energy and pollution.

The refrigeration process can be very power-demanding. According to a 2018 report by the International Energy Agency, collected by The New Yorker, refrigeration accounted for about six percent of the world's energy consumption in 2016. Most of this energy is generated by burning fossil fuels.

All refrigerants used inside home appliances are at least a little pollutant. Some of them use chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons. According to Inside Climate News reporter Phil McKenna these are super-pollutants —greenhouse gases thousands of times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide.

The refrigerant will not affect the food inside the refrigerator or escape its inside in any way during its useful life.

However, when the appliance is disposed of, the chemical will be released into the atmosphere. According to McKenna, "proper disposal occurs in less than 600,000 of the roughly 9 million refrigerators and freezers discarded in the U.S. each year."

Manufacturers offer some alternatives that are becoming more accessible each year. The most common are refrigerators that replace hydrofluorocarbons with isobutane. However, this option is only partially safe as isobutane has roughly the same climate impact as carbon dioxide.

Another problem is that as global warming advances and keeps producing hotter summers and springs, the need for more refrigeration and air conditioning (which uses the same systems) increases.

Luckily, researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, developed ionocaloric cooling, a new way of refrigerating that could allow manufacturers to stop using dangerous and polluting refrigerants.

Energy is released or stored when a material changes phases, like when ice turns into water or evaporates, which can change the temperature around it. For example, when an ice cube starts melting, you can feel the cool air around it if you put your hand close enough.

The researchers took advantage of this process.
It is possible to melt things without energy o heat by adding some charged particles to the material, called ions. The ions will help change the state of the material. An example is how salt can prevent ice from forming on roads.

The team developed a model to showcase how this system could compete with or improve what we use today. It would have a material that can change phases, and a current would move the ions in it to shift its melting point and change the temperature.

Then they ran an experiment using salt made with iodine and sodium to melt ethylene carbonate. It is a common organic solvent that is produced from carbon dioxide.

By using ethylene carbonate, the researchers are not only ensuring that it is safe but also changing their method from Global warming potential (they measure for how pollutant is a technology) zero to negative—helping the environment.

"The landscape of refrigerants is an unsolved problem. No one has successfully developed an alternative solution that makes stuff cold, works efficiently, is safe, and doesn't hurt the environment," Drew Lilley, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, told Science Alert.

Now that the team has shown that their method work, the next step is to push it further and make it more attractive for the industry. "Now, it's time for experimentation to test different combinations of materials and techniques to meet the engineering challenges," Ravi Prasher, one of the researchers, told Science Alert.