1
RACA Journal: ISSN 1812-772X
+ 27( 0) 82 560 8718
RACA Journal Publication www. refrigerationandaircon. co. za eamonn @ interactmedia. co. za editor ' s note
RETHINKING COLLABORATION IN THE RACE TO DECARBONISE
In the refrigeration and HVAC industry, no one needs another lecture about why things must change. The question is no longer whether change is necessary, but how we actually make it happen in the messy reality of old buildings, tight budgets, fragile grids and real people whose livelihoods depend on the systems we are trying to transform.
What struck me listening to a recent presentation was not a new piece of technical data, but a brutally honest admission: after years of pushing hard, investing in new technologies and products, rewriting software, training people and upgrading processes, the presenter said that when they woke up in the morning, the world still mostly looked the same. They had worked sincerely and intelligently within the boundaries of their own business, but the broader industry picture had barely shifted. That, I think, is the uncomfortable truth many of us are feeling. We have all been trying to move the needle from inside our own silos, and the needle is not moving fast enough.
The pressure to transition from synthetic to natural refrigerants is a good example. On paper, the argument is clear. Natural refrigerants avoid many of the long-term environmental risks associated with traditional synthetics. Beyond the familiar headlines around global warming potential and ozone depletion, a quieter but growing concern is the issue of PFAS – the‘ forever chemicals’ that do not break down easily in nature.
In contrast, natural refrigerants are built from substances that already exist in the environment and follow known cycles. They are not a magic wand – they bring their own engineering and safety challenges – but they do avoid the long-term legacy of persistent chemical pollution. If we are honest about what it means to take a generational view of our impact, naturals are going to have to play a central role.
The story is never as simple as‘ just switch’. You cannot walk into a factory and tell half the workforce there is no more work tomorrow because everything is going natural next week. You cannot rip out every synthetic-based system overnight in a supermarket chain or a logistics operation and expect the business to survive the capital shock. You cannot ignore the fact that there are buildings in our cities designed around 80 – 85 ° C boiler water and limited electrical capacity, now facing fuel phase-outs with almost no room, physically or electrically, to add more plant.
That is the tension we need to acknowledge: environmental urgency on one side, and the social and economic realities of transition on the other. The answer will come from how we, as an ecosystem, choose to work together.
One of the more interesting examples I have heard recently involved an old building in a dense urban environment. It had
RACA Journal I October 2026 been running for decades on high-temperature boiler water. Policy and local pressure were pushing out the boilers, but the building’ s electrical infrastructure could not support simply adding conventional heat pumps alongside existing chillers. Space was limited, the heating and cooling systems had historically been separate, and nothing off the shelf quite fit the puzzle.
The group of partners sat down and treated it as a joint design problem. Over time, and with plenty of trial and error, they developed a natural-refrigerant-based system that could provide both heating and cooling from a single piece of plant, serving multiple independent heating and cooling loops, and reaching the temperatures the building actually needed. By consolidating functions, they reduced the number of separate units, cut down on the components manufactured and transported, simplified maintenance, extended expected lifespan compared to previous equipment, and made smart use of what would otherwise have been waste heat.
What made it possible was not one party optimising their own component in isolation, but several stakeholders sharing risk, information and intent. Instead of a consultant specifying the cheapest coil, a contractor choosing the quickest-to-install standard unit, and a manufacturer fighting to keep its bill of materials as lean as possible, the group looked at the building as a whole over its life, not just at a shopping list of parts.
We have spent decades rewarding local optimisation: the lowest first cost on a line item, the highest COP at a single design point, the fastest installation time on a tight programme. A fan might be cheaper if it is not the high-efficiency EC version. A coil might be easier to sell if it ignores a more complex control strategy. A condensing unit might fly off the shelf if it is priced to win tenders rather than to deliver the best lifecycle outcome.
Watching this sector year after year, my sense is that the companies and professionals who will thrive in the next decade are those who are willing to work this way. They will still need to make money; no one is suggesting charity disguised as engineering. But they will look beyond the next invoice and the next tender, and ask how their decisions today shape the environmental and social landscape their children will inherit. RACA
www. refrigerationandaircon. co. za
1