NHL Partnership With Chemical Company Is Leaving The Environment

The NHL’s sustainability messages now prominently include Chemours chemicals, but this was not always the case. “Green Tracks” awarded by the League infographic About refrigeration systems prior to 2018, he says, by approving ammonia and carbon dioxide as natural refrigerants, ammonia refrigeration systems have “significantly lower potential for ozone depletion and global warming” than HFCs and the previous one, hydrochlorofluorocarbons, or HCFCs.

Matthew Rigby, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Bristol in England, said the HFC refrigerants currently marketed by the NHL are “not the worst”, especially when compared to compounds commonly used in arenas in the past. “They’re pretty non-toxic and don’t deplete the ozone layer,” he said. “Obviously that’s much more preferable, but they still affect the climate.”

Alex Hillbrand, an expert on HFCs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental group, said the biggest concern with ice rink cooling and similar systems is that they tend to leak a lot. “This system has a number of connections that can leak, such as metal-to-metal connections,” he said. “The chiller vibrates significantly while operating. And over time the vibrations cause small gaps to form.”

Refrigerants can also escape when these systems are ultimately disposed of, making it important to have programs in place to capture, collect and properly burn the gas, Hillbrand said.

Most scientists look at how much a substance heats the planet over 100 years to understand its impact on the environment, called the global warming potential. While the Environmental Research Agency and Chemours differ slightly in numbers, they generally agree that the first of the two refrigerants marketed as Opteon heats the atmosphere about 600 times more than the same mass of carbon dioxide over a 100-year period; second, it heats the atmosphere more than 1,200 times.

The global warming potential of ammonia is zero.

“You’re removing the ammonia from the plants,” Hillbrand said. “This is a step in the wrong direction.”

Chemours claims that Opteon is mostly used to replace more harmful chemicals in older ice cooler systems, reducing the global warming potential of these systems by anywhere from 20 to 80 percent. Company spokesperson Sueta said Opteon is cost-effective for runway operators and that although ammonia has no global warming potential, its production requires the use of fossil fuels.