When Kola Adebayo, an air conditioning technician in Abuja, gets a call to fix a malfunctioning air conditioning system, one of the first questions he asks is if the AC needs servicing or a gas refill.
Mr Adebayo said these problems are persistent in the Nigerian capital. “Usually, people tell you their ACs are not freezing, and it needs servicing or a gas refill,” Mr Adebayo said, hauling a piece of equipment.
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In Nigeria, air conditioners have become popular as the appliance, once a luxury for the middle class, has become a necessity in an increasingly hot climate.
The cooling sector is governed by regulations that prohibit the release of refrigerant gases into the air, such as by conducting leak tests after repairing an appliance.
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Yet the systematic release of gases into the atmosphere due to faulty installations, unsafe disposal at the end of use, or adding gas without leak testing is a common problem in Nigeria, even though it is illegal.
When the refrigerant gases used in cooling and freezing appliances stay within a closed circuit, they are safe. But if they leak out into the air as a result of a malfunction or poor service practices, or if the appliance is not properly disposed of at the end of its life, the gases are highly destructive to the earth’s sensitive atmosphere.
According to an AP report, the refrigerant gases that make cooling systems work have hundreds to thousands of times the warming potency of carbon dioxide, and the worst of them also damage the ozone layer.
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They are “the most potent greenhouse gases known to modern science,” one research paper put it, and they’re growing fast.
In 2016, officials from over 150 countries signed the Kigali Amendment, agreeing to limit these gases being spewed into the air.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, also enacted regulations guiding the use of these gases. But enforcement is a problem, threatening the country’s commitments to slash emissions.
“We have some rules and regulations, but many technicians are not well-trained, so they don’t know,” said Ken Buchi, a market leader in the refrigerant gases business in Kano.
“People need to be enlightened first, before regulators can enforce laws,” Mr Buchi said.
Experts said the weak regulatory system for the cooling industry in Nigeria is evident in the lack of proper training and awareness of environmental harm caused by refrigerants among technicians.
When a client contacted him to fix his air conditioner sometime in January, Emma Bognor, a technician in the Sabon Gari District of Kano, casually frittered the gas from the unit into the air, preparing it to be refilled with a new gas after the repair.
Samson Adewunsi, owner and technician at Gaskiya Tech and Cooling Kano, also does the same thing all the time. He wastes the existing gas of an air conditioner into the air before refilling it with fresh gas.
If Messrs Adewunsi and Bognor had followed the country’s regulations, they would have collected the gas into a canister, preventing or minimising the gas’s environmental harm.
“I am not aware of this procedure, and I don’t think it’s necessary,” Mr Adewunsi argued. “Since I don’t have a canister, the easiest thing to do is to waste the gas into the air before refilling,” added Mr Adewunsi, who originally specialised in welding before venturing into fixing air conditioners to increase his income options.
Mr Adewunsi was trained by his “master” in 1986 and set up his own workshop in 1990. He has trained several people over the past three decades, but their training did not include the required safety standards for handling refrigerants.
He and many others still did not conduct a leakproof test after installing an air conditioner, which is required by the country’s cooling industry regulations.
Technicians like Messrs Adewunsi and Bognor are self-employed and unsupervised, but they often attract customers because they offer cheaper services.
However, some trained workers do follow environmental rules governing the use of cooling refrigerants. But their kinds of installations and services cost more.
Not just Leaking AC Units
Leaking AC units are just one way refrigerants seep into the atmosphere, raising levels and contributing to increasingly extreme weather.
Cars are another source of these super pollutants, said Abdulrazaq Nafiu, an expert in refrigeration and cooling in Kano.
AC systems in gas-powered vehicles are “prone to leaking,” Mr Nafiu said, and on average, approximately 25 per cent of refrigerant from all cars leak out every year.
In the Durumi area of Abuja, there is a workshop specialising in car air conditioning repair and there is a line of cars waiting to be fixed. The drivers have their windows down and are wiping sweat off their foreheads.
When they want to repair a major component of a car’s AC system, the technician, Samuel Charles, said they first need to empty any residual refrigerant gas.
Ideally, Mr Nafiu said, they should use specialised equipment to suck out the refrigerant, and following repairs, pump the same gas back in. This equipment pays off for the mechanic and the planet.
By reusing the gas, mechanics don’t have to buy as much new gas and they also emit less refrigerant into the atmosphere.
But Mr Charles and his assistant Aliyu don’t own the equipment, which can cost thousands of naira. Therefore, they just release the gas into the air.
Mr Nafiu said car air conditioners emit refrigerants in two ways. “First, car air conditioners are prone to refrigerant leaks. Unlike their stationary counterparts, mobile air conditioning systems aren’t hermetically sealed at the factory. Instead of soldered, leak-tight connections, car air conditioning systems are held together with an array of nuts and bolts.
“After thousands of kilometres of driving, bumps, and vibration, these connections loosen, invariably leading to refrigerant leaks. Leaks have several deleterious effects: the air conditioner becomes less energy efficient, parts like the compressor wear down faster, and your car stops blowing cold air,” the expert told PREMIUM TIMES.
Potent greenhouse gases
For most of the twentieth century, the refrigerant gases used were chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFC). However, scientists discovered that these caused widespread damage to the ozone layer in the mid to late 1900s.
So, countries came together and ratified the Montreal Protocol, which went into effect in 1987 and banned CFCs. This is cited as one of the most successful international environmental laws ever.
But the effort to get rid of CFCs resulted in many chemical manufacturers choosing to replace them with two groups of chemicals with a different problem – hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). These refrigerants
break down ozone molecules far less but are extremely potent greenhouse gases.
Their capacity to warm the atmosphere – measured as global warming potential – is thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide, with some being up to 13,850 times more potent.
Although these chemicals are used for several different purposes, by far the largest source of emissions is from refrigeration and air conditioning systems. Over time, they can leak out into the atmosphere from damaged appliances or car air conditioning systems, for example.
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According to industry professionals and public records, the most common air conditioners in Africa still use what’s known as R-22 gas. This refrigerant is less harmful to the ozone layer compared to the older, even more damaging CFCs.
But R-22 is also considered many times more damaging to the world’s climate than carbon dioxide, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
For example, about one-half kilogramme of R-22 is said to equal one ton of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that causes a lot of problems, not just to the environment as a whole but specifically to agriculture and farms.
However, while carbon dioxide can stay in the atmosphere for more than 200 years, R-22 stays for about 12 years. R-22 air conditioners also have low energy efficiency, and most of the electricity powering them in Africa is from fossil fuels.
The R-22 phasing-out process began in 2010 to protect the ozone layer and slow climate change.
Nigeria is planning to ban R-22 refrigerants by 1 January 2030. But without enough enforcement, that target is not likely to be met, experts said.
Air conditioners running on R-410A are the next most common in Africa after R-22. Although R-410A is better for the environment than R-22, it also damages the atmosphere. An R-410A has a warming potential 2,088 times greater than that of carbon dioxide and lasts roughly 30 years in the atmosphere. This refrigerant is also common in Europe and the US.
But experts say the R-410A refrigerants are still widespread and increasing rapidly due to a global surge in demand for air conditioning, sluggish industry innovation and inadequate legislation around their disposal.
Around the world, the demand for air conditioning is growing as temperatures rise and people become wealthier, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The number of global cooling devices is estimated to increase from 3.6 billion to 9.5 billion by 2050, according to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the IEA.
Providing cooling to everyone who needs it, and not just those who can afford it, will require 14 billion devices by 2050, the report notes.
Because cooling is essential for human health and economic development – to protect life-saving vaccines and medicines, prevent food from spoiling, safeguard communities during heatwaves, power energy sources, and much more – start-up companies around the world are creating technologies to make cooling solutions more sustainable and cost-effective.
Amaka Ejiofor, a spokesperson for Nigeria’s National Environmental Standards and Regulations Agency, declined to comment when contacted by a PREMIUM TIMES reporter. Instead, she said questions should be sent through email. An email sent by this newspaper was acknowledged, but the questions were not answered.
This reporting was completed with the support of the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development as part of the Centre for Investigative Journalism’s Open Climate Reporting Initiative.
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