A welcome from our newest refrigerant destruction partner

Just the gist

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❄️ Recoolit joins our refrigerant destruction mission — The project technicians go out into the field and collect HFC gas for destruction before it leaks into the atmosphere. Learn more in this welcome letter from the project CEO.

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Recoolit, the team behind our newest Refrigerant Destruction project, is on a mission to collect and destroy HFC gas. Here is Louis Potok’s letter to Wren:

Hello Wren supporters!

I'm Louis, co-founder and CEO of Recoolit. I'm delighted that our carbon credits will be offered as part of the Wren portfolio, starting today.

Two years ago I moved to Indonesia and launched Recoolit to start solving the most neglected problem in climate change: refrigerants. These chemicals, used in every air conditioner on the planet, are 2000x worse than CO2 in climate impact, and account for 6% of all global emissions. Most of these emissions, especially in the emerging markets where we work, are vented directly by AC technicians when servicing aircons or scrapping old units. This isn't because they're evil or hate the environment – they just have no other choice.

Recoolit was built from the ground up to support these technicians, who are often semi-skilled freelance workers making only a few hundred dollars per month. We treat them with respect and help them become part of the solution, and they're thrilled to be helping save the planet that their children, and ours, will inherit.

These emerging markets are also where the impact of climate change will be felt most strongly, and where air conditioning will be most needed for climate adaptation, helping keep people healthy and productive even during climate-intensified heat waves.

When technicians join the Recoolit program, we provide training in sustainable refrigerant management, and let them borrow the tools they need to collect the gas safely – at no charge. In fact, we pay them for every kilogram of harmful gas they collect, to compensate for the extra time and effort it takes them to do things the right way. We destroy all that gas at a cement kiln right here in Indonesia – a UN-approved destruction technology that, unlike other technologies, has the potential to scale across the global south because it uses existing infrastructure.

Carbon credits provide the funding that allow this whole program to operate. We have no other revenue source, and every dollar that we bring in goes directly to paying technicians, buying equipment to lend them, paying for more destruction, and the salaries of our amazing team in Jakarta that gets all this done. We're committed to providing only the very highest-quality credits to our buyers. If not for your purchase, every molecule of gas we collect would have hit the atmosphere today, without a trace of doubt. And our destruction process is fully permanent – the gas is incinerated, and all byproducts neutralized by the alkaline environment in the cement kiln. We also track every step of this process – collection, transportation, and destruction – on our app, and show our buyers exactly the impact that they're paying for. Too many carbon credits keep their evidence hidden behind a veil of PDFs and obscurity, and transparency is the only way to guarantee high-quality credits at scale.

We're inspired by the work that Wren is doing to surface the highest-impact climate projects to their subscribers, and their approach to transparency. And you, the amazing supporters, are the ones who make it all happen. With your help, we'll scale across Indonesia and around the globe, helping upskill a generation of workers and empower them to participate in the fight against climate change.

Thank you for your support!
— Recoolit x the Wren team 🧡