For Carrefour, refrigeration plays a key role in delivering environmental sustainability objectives. Recording excellent results in warm climates too, the retail giant is putting natural refrigerants at the heart of its strategy to become HFC-free in the near future.
Supermarket giants Carrefour, METRO AG and Delhaize are demonstrating that CO2 transcritical refrigeration technology can help retailers to save energy costs and meet their corporate sustainability goals, heard participants in the 7th annual ATMOsphere Europe conference in Barcelona last month.
At last month’s ATMOsphere Asia conference in Tokyo, Japan, Junya Ichikawa, president of Sanden Environmental Product Corporation, outlined ambitions to ensure that production of the company’s CO2 compressor units hits the one million mark in the near future. The adoption of natural refrigerants by end users is currently the main market driver, Ichikawa says.
French food retail giant Carrefour set the stage for a broad discussion during its ‘Innovation Forum’ about competition between natural systems, the trend towards smaller stores, and the need for integrated HVAC&R solutions.
Two years after launching the first transcritical CO2 system in Romania at its hypermarket in Galati, Carrefour has successfully installed a new system with CO2 ejector technology in Timisoara. The store is the first in Romania to use this modern technology, which is expected to deliver energy savings of 13%.
Carrefour has big plans for CO2. The company won’t go so far as to declare an all-CO2 philosophy, yet its expansion into warmer ambient climates, in particular two transcritical pilot stores in Valencia, would suggest that notion is closer to reality than they might think. R744.com sat down with the Director International Support at Carrefour, Jean-Michel Fleury, about the expanding CO2 transcritical market in Europe.
With CO2 transcritical retail stores in warmer European climates expected to hit 100 in the next two to five years thanks to technology developments like adiabatic cooling, ejectors and parallel compression, Bulgaria represents a potential growth market for the technology. Although there are still barriers to overcome in the EU Member State positive developments are on the way with leading retailer Kaufland seriously considering CO2-only systems.
As climate change continues to permeate political and social dialogue, an increasing number of food retailers are working to green their corporate image and take the lead in engaging in more sustainable practices. Refrigeration consumes a considerable amount of energy and contributes substantially to greenhouse gas emissions. At ATMOsphere Europe 2015, supermarket giants Carrefour, Delhaize and SONAE MC discussed their use of lean, green, GHG-cutting refrigeration machines.
