The Austrian government subsidised the replacement of old cooling devices through new A++ models with almost 3 million euro. Good for the purse and good for the environment. 

From 1993 on, when buying a cooling device in Austria, it was obligatory to acquire at the same time a recycling certificate which was a way to make consumers pay for responsible disposal beforehand and hamper the temptation of improper elimination afterwards. However, since the implementation of the European Directive on Waste of Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), the costs for the recycling have to be paid by manufacturers or distributors.

Energy savings

The 45 million euros that consumers had paid for the recycling certificates have partially been reimbursed, the not reclaimed part was parked in a fund and used to finance the “separation bonus” (Trennungsprämie), a 4 month initiative inviting people to discard their old refrigerators, freezers and cooling units and replace them with new energy efficient A++ models. From September to December 2009, 33,000 refrigerators were replaced resulting in an estimated reduction of 8.26 million kWh of energy consumption. The energy consumption of the old appliances which for a major part were over 15 years old, was an estimated 14,111 mWh per year whereas the energy consumption for the new models is calculated to be around only 5,848d mWh a year. The difference in energy consumed equals the annual energy needs of 1,900 average households.

CO₂ emissions reductions

The exchange of the 33,000 cooling devices reduces by 1,339 tons the annual CO₂ emissions caused by energy production, projected over the usual 15 years usage this equals 20,000 tons of CO₂ saved. And there are still great savings potentials: 1,55 million of the refrigerators and freezers currently in use in Austria are older than 10 years. Their replacement with new appliances would save another 300,000 million kWh and 50,000 tons of CO₂ emissions per year, i.e. 750,000 tons of CO₂ emissions spread over the average product life cycle.

These considerable savings are not yet taking into account, that the new generation of refrigerators in Austria are using hydrocarbons as a standard, since the first introduction of R600a as the so-called Greenfreeze technology in Germany in 1992. This reduces direct CO₂ emissions through leakages and avoids all the in older generation devices used HFCs accompanying environmental issues such as greenhouse gas potential, ozone depletion etc.