ACR Journal

June | July 2023 Over the last few months, you may have seen headlines from industry and national media outlets talking about ‘Forever Chemicals’ or PFAS, and how it could potentially affect the RACHP industry. But what is it really about? As you might imagine it is a relatively complex and detailed situation, but the following is an attempt to explain where we are in the processes currently underway in both the European Union (EU) and Great Britain. REACH The legislation at the centre of all this is known as REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and restriction of Chemicals). Every chemical used in quantities of 1 tonne per annum or more must have a REACH registration and be approved for use in the intended REFRIGERANTS 24 Neil Roberts, Senior Technical Sales Manager at Climalife UK, sheds some light on a complex subject. PFAS: what is it really about? applications. Pre-2020 the UK conformed to the EU REACH legislation, but since 2020, Great Britain has followed its own UK REACH legislation and no longer has to conform to the EU legislation. There is a class of chemicals referred to as poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) which exhibit unique properties including tolerance to extreme temperatures and ability to repel oil and water that can be very desirable in many applications. But these very properties also make some of them slow to degrade meaning they can remain in the environment for many decades leading to them sometimes being referred to as ‘forever chemicals’. Defining PFAS There is no single globally adopted definition of what is a PFAS, but legacy products such as perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctane carboxylic acid (PFOA) have been regulated for some time, as they were identified as being highly persistent in the environment (P), bio accumulative (B) and toxic (T). In 2021 the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) redefined what constitutes a PFAS, increasing the number of chemicals in the class to greater than 9000. This definition may include most of the fluorinated molecules used as refrigerants, with the exceptions of R-32, R-152a and R-23, and is based purely on molecules containing certain chemical structures and is not based on the PBT properties of the chemicals. REACH Update Proposals Using the new OECD PFAS definition, four EU member states and Norway Volume 9 No.4 Neil Roberts