Swiss food giant Nestlé is launching new environmentally efficient ice cream freezers, developed using natural refrigerants across Europe.
The move is part of Nestlé's commitment to progressively phase out the use of high global warming potential refrigerants, such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFC).
It also allows the company to step towards meeting the Consumer Goods Forum Resolution on Refrigeration that encourages businesses to take actions to phase out some HFC refrigerants from 2015.
Nestlé made its commitment to purchase the commercial horizontal ice cream chest freezers across Europe that use only natural refrigerants.
Natural refrigerant substances occur naturally like carbon dioxide, ammonia, water or air and hydrocarbons, like propane and iso-butane. These do not harm the ozone layer and have no or negligible global warming effects.
The new freezers help reduce energy consumption by more than a third over the existing systems.
Nestlé has already introduced 18,000 natural refrigerant hydrocarbon freezers across the world.
In addition, it replaced synthetic refrigerants with natural alternatives in more than 92% of its industrial refrigeration systems, with an investment of CHF240m.
