Roche’s natural refrigerant treatment

March 07, 2019

The Roche Group is committed to phasing out halogenated refrigerants.

With its global reach, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. (commonly referred to as Roche) understands the responsibility it shares to help put the world on a more sustainable environmental path. “Eliminating halogenated substances in all areas is a big step to achieving our goals here,” Dr. Joachim Lemberg, Roche’s head of safety, security, health and environment (SHE) data analysis and reporting.

The Roche Group is split into two different divisions – pharmaceuticals and diagnostics.

Focusing on oncology, immunology, ophthalmology, infectious diseases and neuroscience, Roche ranks among the world’s leading developers of targeted treatments combined with corresponding diagnostics. Roche Pharmaceuticals is the world’s largest biotechnology company and the world’s leading provider of cancer treatments.

Roche is phasing out halogenated refrigerants across its cooling portfolio of laboratory refrigerators, cold stores, walk-in research coolers, stability chambers for product testing, cafeteria equipment, heating, air conditioning, centrifuges, freeze drying, fire suppression systems, packaging foam and data centres.

The company applies the policy of adopting natural refrigerants where reasonably possible to all the above applications.

The K6 Directive – one of 24 mandatory corporate directives that every part of the Roche Group must follow – guides Roche in discontinuing its use of substances that have a negative impact on the environment caused by ozone depletion, global warming or persistence in the atmosphere with potential long-term negative effects.

“We have a clear target of phasing out these substances 100%,” says Thomas Wolf, Roche’s chief environmental sustainability officer. “We want to eliminate them completely.”

“Other companies harbour similar aspirations to ours, but I can’t think of another firm that’s as progressive in pursuing these goals as us,” Wolf says.

The first edition of the K6 Directive was published on 22 September 1994. Roche’s primary target was to eliminate ozone-depleting substances – CFCs, HCFCs and HBFCs (hydrobromofluorocarbons) – by 31 December 2015, which it nearly achieved.

Starting from 95 metric tonnes, that left 9.5 metric tonnes of fluorinated gases (f-gases) – namely HFCs and PFCs (perfluorinated compounds) – in the Roche Group’s inventory. By 2018, there were just 7.5 tonnes of f-gases left. The ultimate goal is to eliminate them all.

While Roche sought to replace ODSs with alternative solutions like natural refrigerants from day one of the K6 programme, in certain cases it installed HVAC&R equipment using HFCs and PFCs as an interim step for business continuity reasons.

Phasing out halogenated refrigerants entirely poses a number of challenges. In some applications, natural refrigerant-based alternatives are not yet readily available at the scale required by Roche. In others, it is more cost-effective to wait until equipment reaches the end of its useful life.

And the latest edition of the directive extended the scope of the directive to include leased assets – whereupon a new challenge arose. “We don’t own the buildings, but we want to be K6-compliant,” Lemberg says. “We have to convince the landlords who own the buildings, who it can be difficult to influence.”

As Roche moves towards a 100% phase-out of halogenated refrigerants, soon the group will put in place new targets for the period 2020-2025 – perhaps a reduction by a further 20-25%.