VANCOUVER - Greenpeace has tried without success for more than 15 years to arrange for the appropriate approvals in Canada for green technology that would significantly reduce the impact of domestic fridges and freezers on global warming from greenhouse-gas emissions.

But Coca-Cola had an easier time when it started preparing for the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver.

Coca-Cola, an official sponsor of the Winter Games, plans to use 1,400 new climate-friendly coolers and vending machines at Olympic venues. The company spent $40-million on developing the refrigeration units. A year after beginning the process, Coca-Cola has received the seal of approval for its coolers and anticipates the vending machines will be officially recognized later this year.

The Canadian certification bodies were initially stymied by Coca-Cola's green machines. They did not have standards for the refrigeration unit or procedures to test the green technology. However, authorities worked with Coca-Cola to develop the process to handle their refrigeration equipment.

"Coca-Cola and its suppliers challenged the standards bodies to identify methods to evaluate these new refrigeration systems for safety," company spokeswoman Kristy Payne said this week. "Those processes were not in place. It was new for everyone."

Coca-Cola has opened the way for the next company with similar technology for commercial use, Ms. Payne said. However, Greenpeace is still trying to figure out how to help companies that already sell climate-friendly home fridges and freezers abroad get in the game in Canada.

Janos Maté, who has worked on behalf of Greenpeace around the world on the refrigeration issue, is flummoxed that Canadian authorities are resisting technology that can be found in 300 million fridges and freezers in homes throughout Europe, Japan, China, Argentina, Brazil and elsewhere.

"It's like a low-hanging fruit on the tree," Mr. Maté said this week. "It is one of the easiest things to do to eliminate high global-warming agents. It's much easier to change the technology [in a household fridge] than to change whole sectors of the economy, like changing forestry practices or how houses are warmed.

"We have the technology; it is just a matter of switching the refrigerants," Mr. Maté said.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon offered dire warnings of accelerating climate change this week in a speech at the World Climate Conference in Geneva. "Our foot is stuck on the accelerator and we are heading toward an abyss," he said.

"Scientists have been accused for years of scaremongering," he said. "But the real scaremongers are those who say we cannot afford climate action - that it will hold back economic growth. They are wrong. Climate change could spell widespread economic disaster."

The problem with refrigeration is one of those issues that was supposed to have been solved more than 30 years ago. Since at least the 1930s, fridges used non-toxic, non-flammable chlorofluorocarbons in their cooling systems. Scientists in the 1970s discovered that the CFCs broke up in the stratosphere, releasing chlorine that destroyed the ozone. In a massive global initiative, hydrofluorocarbon, which had minimal impact on the ozone layer, replaced CFC in many of the cooling systems used in refrigeration.

But then scientists discovered HFC was a potent greenhouse gas, heating the planet at a much faster rate than carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas. A pound of HFC could do as much damage, in terms of global warming, as 3,830 pounds of carbon dioxide for 20 years after its release.

The world has more than one billion fridges and 400 million mobile air conditioners in cars and trucks. Challenged to do something rather than just protest, Greenpeace in Germany worked with engineers who developed a HFC-free alternative in 1992, a hydrocarbon refrigeration unit they called Greenfreeze. The equipment uses isobutane as the refrigerant and cyclopentane as the blowing agent for the insulation foam. The HFC-free technology was provided to manufacturers for free.

Less than two decades later, about 40 per cent of the world's production of domestic refrigerators and freezers uses the technology. Greenfreeze dominates the market in Europe and is prominent in Japan and China. The technology is also in use in India, Brazil and Argentina. Factories around the world produce HFC-free fridges for domestic use and fridges with HFC for export to Canada and the United States because the new technology isn't allowed in yet.

The 2000 Summer Games in Sydney were the first Olympics to pay attention to greenhouse-gas emissions. Greenpeace held protests and wrote letters to authorities urging them to stop using HFC in vending machines. Coca-Cola officials told Greenpeace they were interested in technology that reduced their climate footprint.

"It was another phase in the evolution of Greenpeace," said Mr. Maté. He has been working on ozone-depleting and global-warming campaigns since 1992. "We were co-operating with one of the largest corporations in the world. We would confront them on some issues and co-operate, and give them credit on other issues."

Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Unilever have been working co-operatively with Greenpeace since 2004 on developing HFC-free technology. PepsiCo Inc.,v, Carlsberg and Ikea joined the group called Refrigerants, Naturally in 2006.
Ms. Payne of Coca-Cola said an evaluation of that company's climate footprint identified gases escaping from its refrigeration units as the largest component, far exceeding the impact of either manufacturing or emissions from its fleet of trucks. Because Greenfreeze uses flammable chemicals, Coca-Cola decided to invest in developing its own technology and developed a cooling system that relies on compressed carbon dioxide, which is non-flammable.

"Safety was a huge issue around choosing CO2 and spending all that money," Ms. Payne said.

Although carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the amount used in the close refrigerant units is minimal and would cause significantly less damage than HFCs.

Mr. Maté said the flammability of Greenfreeze has not been an issue in any other country. Canadian standards had prohibited flammable refrigerants until a few years ago. However, the Canadian Standards Association now says government regulations must be changed before its approval can be issued for the technology.

Coca-Cola discovered that Canada has no restrictions on CO2 as a refrigerant in small appliances. But the new technology must be certified by the Canadian Standards Association as meeting requirements of the Canadian electric code. Natural Resources Canada has to certify the energy efficiency for the CO2 cooling system.

Coca-Cola was the first to ask for approval of a carbon-dioxide-refrigerated small appliance. "Until this year, safety standards for using the natural substance CO2 as we do did not exist," Ms. Payne said.

The coolers and vending machines, which also include an innovative system to regulate temperature, would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by approximately 5,600 metric tons, compared to refrigeration equipment now used in Canada. The reduction would be comparable to taking 29,000 cars off the road for two weeks during the Winter Games.

Meanwhile, beyond Canada, Coca-Cola already has 60,000 HFC-free coolers in the market. "We are taking a leadership role with these coolers to fight climate change," Ms. Payne said.

After the Olympics, Coca-Cola hopes it will be allowed to keep the HFC-free coolers in Canada.