Greenpeace today came down heavily on leading refrigerator manufacturers, accusing them of failing to embrace environment-friendly technologies, thereby causing global warming and climate change.
Launching its campaign against leading multinational refrigerator manufacturers, Greenpeace energy campaigner Srinivas K charged these companies with adopting 'double standards'.
"In their home countries they have shifted to using environment-friendly hydrocarbon technology for the manufacturing process. However, in India they have not followed the world pattern," he alleged.
With the exception of one company, refrigerator manufacturers had stuck to the hydrofluro carbon, which, studies proved, resulted in global warming. "One unit of HFCs was found to cause 1,300 times global warming, compared to a unit of carbon," he said.
Over 50 million refrigerators were used every day across India, of which only two million were made with hydrocarbon technology. The remaining 48 million refrigerators in India used the harmful HFCs or CFCs (chloroflurocarbons), he said.
The estimated market of refrigerators in the country was 4.1 million units with a penetration of 11 per cent. The growth of the market was as high as 15 per cent.
"Way back in 1992, Greenpeace had highlighted that HFC and hydro chlorofulorocarbon, used by refrigerator manufacturers across the world, were gases that had alarming global warming potential.
"That is when Greenpeace innovation units developed 'Greenfreeze' technology using hydrocarbon gases, an open patent technology, which was cheaper, effective and climate friendly," he said.
Though companies in Europe, Australia, Japan had adopted the friendly technology, countries like India and US continued to use the old technology, he said.
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