In the fall of 2002, four Japanese home electronics manufacturers launched sales of fluorocarbon-free refrigerators that are larger in capacity and more energy-efficient than the fast-selling 300-liter products released that spring.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. started to sell the industry's most energy-efficient fluorocarbon-free refrigerators in October 2002. The HFC-free U-Series refrigerators have a large storage capacity, ranging from 350 to 450 liters, and a newly-developed type of vacuum insulation called "U-Vacua,"which has the best insulation efficiency in the world. Home-use refrigerators of this design consume only 200 kWh of electricity per year, the most efficient in the industry's (as of August 26, 2002).

When compared with Matsushita's similar models of ten years ago, the new models save as much as 83 percent in power consumption, equivalent to an annual saving on electricity bill of about 23,000 yen (about U.S. $193). The elimination of the use of fluorocarbons and the lower power consumption also substantially reduce carbon dioxide emissions, by about 83 percent compared to models of ten years ago.

Matsushita and Toshiba Corporation unveiled a fluorocarbon-free refrigerator that uses "Isobutane R600a" as a completely fluorocarbon-free refrigerant, and started marketing it in the beginning of 2002. Since then, Japanese major home electronics makers such as Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd., Sharp Corporation, Hitachi, Ltd., and Fujitsu General Limited have also been manufacturing and selling fluorocarbon-free refrigerators.

Fluorocarbon-free refrigerators that often employ isobutene (R600a), a type of hydrocarbon, as the refrigerant. Isobutane not only has a low global warming coefficient, which makes it less harmful for the ozone layer, it also offers high cooling performance. Isobutane-based fluorocarbon-free refrigerators are already widely used in Europe, but because they use a different cooling method, technological innovations in certain safety aspects were needed in Japanese products before they could be sold on the market.

The recent introduction of larger fluorocarbon-free refrigerators responds to a consumer tendency to want to move up in size when replacing household appliances, and also reflects a growing preference for eco-friendly products, reflecting consumer concern about the global environment and energy conservation.



Posted: 2003/02/07 09:34:45 PM
Japanese version

TAG Eco-product/Business , Energy , Global warming , Manufacturing industry , Technology