It’s been encouraging to see efforts at pressuring corporations, including supermarkets, to move away from climate-destroying hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants (HFCs) gain traction. For instance, Green America’s “Cool It for Climate” campaign has successfully lobbied grocery giants Trader Joe’s and Kroger into using only natural refrigerants in all their new stores. Others like ALDI have been ahead of the curve by using natural refrigerants for years.
But rather than follow their lead in embracing natural refrigerants for use in cooling systems, the chemical industry continues to protect its profits at the expense of communities and the planet.
Instead of natural refrigerants, chemical producers are trying to push corporations to adopt usage of Hydrofluoroolefins (HFOs) in cooling systems, claiming that HFOs have a lower Global Warming Potential than HFCs. But, in some cases, companies are combining HFOs and HFCs—which results in refrigerants that still have a significant climate impact (up to 1,400 times that of CO2), although lower than HFCs alone. And while alternative refrigerants like CO2 and ammonia are naturally abundant, the chemical industry is quick to say that these alternatives are still extracted and refined through industrial processes that consume a lot of energy and contribute to climate impacting emissions, although the overall impacts are far lower than those of HFOs.
What chemical producers are not so quick to point out is how much more they stand to profit if consumers rely on their artificial patented products rather than naturally occurring refrigerants. More critically, unlike natural refrigerants, once HFOs enter the environment, they break down into Trifluoracetic acid and then trifluoroacetate (TFA), a forever chemical (of the PFAS family) linked to human health impacts.
“We need real solutions to climate change,” says Dan Howells, Green America’s Climate Campaigns Director. “Not more false promises from industry. We need climate solutions, not more problems with PFAS and HFOs for already hurting communities.”
In July 2025, the clean cooling energy accelerator group ATMOsphere released their report “The Rising Threat of HFOs and TFA to Health and the Environment” as part of an ongoing campaign to highlight concerns about the environmental and health impacts of HFOs. According to ATMOsphere’s Head of Content Michael Garry, it’s important to consider the long-term impact of the refrigerants we use in our cooling systems not just in terms of how they’re produced, but also how they react once released into the environment.
“The problem is that the most prevalent and smallest forms of PFAS, like TFAs, accumulate fast because they don’t break down and they’re difficult to remove,” Garry says. “The speed at which we can hit the planetary boundary threat is alarming.”
Advocates like Garry point out that while the U.S. currently has no regulations for HFOs, other countries
are already moving quickly to halt unrestricted HFOs use, implement safeguards, and conduct regular studies to evaluate the ongoing impact of TFAs accumulation in the environment and increasingly, in our own bodies. For example, Germany’s chemical regulator is seeking to classify TFAs as “reprotoxic, meaning it can harm human reproductive function, fertility and fetal development.”
Additionally, at an ATMOsphere America Impact of HFOs Session in 2024, Garry noted in a 2022 study, “stream levels of toxic TFAs were found to have increased six-fold between 1998 to 2021 in parts of northern California and remote sites in Alaska.”
It wasn’t that long ago that the same companies pushing HFOs were claiming HFCs had little impact on the environment, despite evidence that they were a major climate pollutant. Repeatedly, chemical companies have shown that trusting the industry to regulate itself is a losing bet—corporations have not learned to value the well-being of people and the planet more than their profits. Their current shift away from HFCs is a direct result of people using our collective power to demand corporate accountability and federal regulations, not a change in corporate consciousness.
All the while, the speed at which TFAs are building up in our world is increasing. Not only is our warming planet putting additional stress on existing systems to keep our food preserved, our machinery working, and our living and working spaces habitable, the proliferation of data centers to handle more cloud storage and AI processing means an even greater demand for refrigerants in cooling systems to keep those centers running. And we’re facing even greater pressure under an administration that favors unfettered industry and is downright hostile to any form of federal oversight and monitoring.
All of this means that the ways we currently use HFOs matter to our daily lives whether we feel the immediate effects or not. Garry stresses that the need for greater caution around HFOs isn’t about fear—it’s about acknowledging the very simple fact that because forever chemical byproducts of HFOs build up very quickly, their negative impacts can start affecting us faster than we can mitigate them.
“Regulation of HFOs is vital because we need to be able to respond as soon as we know a problem is blooming,” Garry says.
This makes campaigns like Green America’s “Cool It for Climate” that pressure companies to go straight to natural refrigerants instead of soft-switching from HFCs to HFOs even more important. Using natural refrigerants in cooling systems is a solution that helps prevent any potential harms of HFOs from accumulating before we have a full understanding of the ways they’ll affect our bodies and our environment.
“It’s not a question of where we are now but where we will be in 10 years if it stays business as usual,” Garry says.
By demanding that companies adopt the use of natural refrigerants instead of products like HFOs that dump more forever chemicals into the environment, we can ensure that “business as usual” means being proactive about preventing harm to people and our planet instead of scrambling to catch up once harm has been done to everything but corporate profits.
