Wren Blog

A personal welcome from Tim Brown, CEO of Tradewater

Ben Stanfield -

Just the gist

Short on time? Here’s what you need to know for this update:

  • 🆕 Refrigerant Destruction joins the Wren Climate Portfolio— The project finds and destroys dangerous CFC-12 refrigerants before they leak into the atmosphere. If you missed the project's introduction, click here.
  • 📑 A welcome letter arrives from project CEO — Tim Brown thanks Wren members for their support and provides some details about the initiative, including some new footage from the project.

For more project updates, follow Wren on Twitter and Instagram.

Tradewater, the team behind Refrigerant Destruction (the newest project in the Wren Climate Portfolio), is an industry leader in the destruction of dangerous, planet-warming refrigerants. Here is Tim Brown's letter to Wren:



"Greetings Wren members,

We are so excited that you have decided to support Tradewater in our effort to prevent the emissions from old refrigerant gases that are potent greenhouse gases. Our work would not be possible if not for the support of people like you.

Tradewater is a mission-based project development company and a certified B-Corp.  Our work is dedicated to collecting, controlling, and destroying greenhouse gases at the largest scale possible and creating economic opportunity through the process.  Our projects include the destruction of refrigerants and halon fire suppressants that are greenhouse gases and deplete the ozone layer.  We also find, measure, and plug abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells that are leaking methane into the atmosphere. Our initial project on Project Wren supports the collection and destruction of ozone depleting refrigerants that are 10,900 times more potent than CO2.

Solving the climate crisis requires reducing emissions of both CO2 and even more-potent non-CO2 gases. The gases Tradewater is addressing are often overlooked yet accelerate climate change, particularly in the short-term. Permanently preventing the releases of refrigerants and methane will buy more time for broader CO2 reduction strategies to take effect.

Tradewater is a small company of 40 people around the world doing everything we can to prevent catastrophic climate change. Since our founding, we have permanently prevented over 5.78 million metric tons of CO2e from entering the atmosphere. Through our model of reinvestment, and with the support of climate heroes like you, Tradewater is poised to scale its impact to 3 million tons annually with projects currently under development in 11 different countries. Thank you for your decision to do your part in fighting climate change, and for choosing to support our solution. You are helping permanently eliminate the threat of these potent non-CO2 gases and to further catalyze on-going collection and destruction networks globally."

New footage from the Refrigerant Destruction project:

A new video shows crates filled with refrigerant canisters being inspected and prepared for transport to the destruction facility in France:

A top-down shot of a rusty canister which has already leaked some of the refrigerants contained within. The rust was caused by moisture and fluctuations in temperature in the warehouse where the canister was stored for years:

That's all for this update! As always, thank you for your support.
— the Wren team 🧡