WhoWhatWhy: Some Grocers Are Far From Green
What appeared on the display of the citizen investigator’s infrared camera looked ominous: wafts of black smoke invisible to the naked eye. The hand-held leak detector kept sounding its alarm in rapid beeps that warned of escaping refrigerant gas. Other shoppers at the Giant Food supermarket, one of many in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, strolled unaware down the store’s freezer aisle. The vapor wouldn’t hurt their health directly but would contribute to climate change; it was a thousand times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping the Earth’s heat.
The finding is just one data point in a mid-February report by the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). It found that more than half the grocery stores sampled in the greater Washington, DC, area leaked hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), greenhouse gases far more damaging than carbon dioxide. Left unchecked, leaks in the 38,000-odd supermarkets across the US would be the equivalent of burning an additional 49 billion pounds of coal each year…
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