Ben & Jerry’s serves up Green Ice Cream
Ben & Jerry’s has teamed up with Greenpeace to unveil an environmentally-friendly freezer being called, “The Prius of Refrigeration.”
The freezer, which will eliminate dangerous F-gas emissions found in standard freezers, runs on about three cigarette lighters’ worth of propane.
Greenpeace is hoping their initiative, called “Greenfreeze,” will catch on in the U.S.A. as it has in Europe.
Today, Greenfreeze technology is in use in more than 300 million refrigerators worldwide, but it was not allowed into the United States until earlier this year when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency authorized Ben & Jerry’s to run a test trial of units equipped with Greenfreeze technology.
The impact the project expects to have will be equivalent to taking 850,000 Hummer H3 SUVs off the road.
Greenpeace engineers developed a new climate-safe refrigeration technology known as Greenfreeze in 1992 and gave it away to any company that wanted it.
The technology was developed by two scientists, Professor Harry Rosin and Dr. Hans Preisendanz from the Institute of Hygiene in Dortmund, Germany, who were looking for a refrigerant which neither destroyed the ozone layer nor contributed to global warming. They settled on a mix of the hydrocarbons propane and butane.
“The beauty of Greenfreeze,” Dr. Preisendanz told the UNEP magazine “Our Planet,” back in 1996, “is that anyone can have the technology. It cannot be patented because all we have done is find the right mix of two existing common gases. The technology is totally free and can be used by the whole world, whether rich or poor, for a whole range of uses.”
“The irony is that the chemical industry also searched for a substitute for CFCs but only in one direction - to find substances they could patent.” he said.
Ben & Jerry’s acquired the freezers as part of a two-year EPA-approved trial program of the “Greenfreeze” technology.
Comments
Cool…hope it catches in India too…
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