Environmental guidance for your business in Northern Ireland & Scotland

Bans on new refrigeration equipment from 1 Jan 2022

What types of equipment are banned?

The ban applies to:

New refrigerators and freezers for commercial use, which are hermetically sealed units containing HFCs with a global warming potential (GWP) of 150 or greater.
New multipack centralised refrigeration systems for commercial use, that have a cooling capacity greater than or equal to 40kW, and which use f-gases with a GWP of 150 or greater. If these are “centralised” systems, where one cooling circuit is used to cool a number of units in parallel, or a “cascade” system where the one cooling circuit is used to cool one or more units connected in series, the primary circuit is allowed to use an f-gas with a GWP less than 1,500

The most commonly used refrigerant that will be subject to these bans is the F-gas HFC-134a, with a GWP of 1,430.

What you should do

Check your equipment and see if it is one of these two types of refrigeration system. Check which refrigerant your equipment uses.

If on checking the equipment you notice that it does contain an F Gas with a GWP of 150 or greater and it was placed on the market after 1 January 2022 then please report this to your environmental regulator.

FgasODSNI@daera-ni.gov.uk

FGas_ODS@sepa.org.uk

Sales of new units

New units imported, manufactured or placed on the market after 1 January 2022 can only contain HFCs with a GWP below 150.

Units that were placed on the market before 1 January that contain F-gases with a GWP greater than 150 can still be sold, so long as you can prove that they were available for purchase before 1 January 2022.