EPA Awards First GreenChill Platinum Award for Grocery Store Refrigeration

Ever wandered through the grocery store aisles wondering how much energy the store consumes every day? Well, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been thinking –and doing something-- about it too.

The GreenChill Advanced Refrigeration Partnership is an EPA cooperative alliance with the supermarket industry to promote advanced technologies, strategies, and practices that reduce refrigerant charges and emissions of ozone-depleting substances and greenhouse gases.

Recently, Star Market at Chestnut Hill in Newton, Mass. became the first grocery store in the nation to receive the EPA’s GreenChill Partnership platinum store award. The advanced refrigeration technology in the new store significantly reduces its impact on climate change and the stratospheric ozone layer by cutting the use of refrigerants by 85 percent compared with the typical supermarket.

GreenChill partners emit about 50 percent fewer emissions than the industry average, and have pledged to continually lower them as part of the program. The EPA estimates that if every supermarket in the nation reduced emissions to the current GreenChill average, the U.S. would prevent 22 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and 240 tons of ozone-depleting substances annually, and save $108 million in refrigerant costs each year.

GreenChill has 46 partners, with more than 6,500 retail food stores in 47 states. The EPA's GreenChill Advanced Refrigeration Partnership also recently announced its 2009 partner awards, and among the awardees are: Sprouts Farmers Market, Fresh & Easy, Raley's Family of Fine Stores, Whole Foods, Supervalu (including the Albertsons and Lucky Supermarkets banners), and Hill Phoenix.

“Supermarkets and their customers know that it’s cool to earn the EPA’s GreenChill Store certification, but the only way to describe the first platinum-level GreenChill supermarket in the nation is, ‘wicked cool,’“ said Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. “This store shows that smart design and advanced technologies help us right now to better protect our climate, the ozone layer, and our health.”

GreenChill's founding food retail partners created baseline measurements of corporate-wide refrigerant emissions in 2007 and set goals to reduce those emissions in 2008. These partners reduced their aggregated total corporate emissions rate from 13 percent to 11.9 percent in 2008, an emissions reduction of 8.5 percent in one year.

New partners pledge to go above and beyond regulatory requirements by measuring and tracking refrigerant emissions that affect climate change and the Earth's ozone layer, and then setting reduction targets for these emissions. Partners also agree to use only ozone-friendly alternatives in all new and remodeled stores. GreenChill now has a total of 46 partners, including 37 food retail partners with over 6,500 stores in 47 states.

Image courtesy of Flickr