Headquartered in the Netherlands, Action is a fast growing international non-food discounter, with over 1,400 stores across the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria and Poland. In Action stores, the discounter sells more than 6,000 different products, mainly non-food. While offering its customers good quality products at surprisingly low prices, Action continuously explores new ways to reduce its environmental impact.
Therefore Action intensifies its partnership with Daikin for this new ground breaking project: reclaiming refrigerant from its refurbished stores and reusing it.
A circular economy of refrigerants
During the first half of 2019, the two companies collaborated to collect R410A refrigerant gas from 12 Action stores which were being refurbished, and reused the reclaimed gas in 10 new Action stores across Europe.
These actions will be intensified towards the future to reuse even more refrigerant.
“By setting up this circular economy of refrigerants within our own store network we further reduce our environmental impact. Instead of producing more waste by disposing the old refrigerant and producing something new, we use what is available. In this way we create a closed circle of refrigerant use within the Action network.”
- Michiel Coolen, Group Construction Manager Action
Mr. Toshitaka Tsubouchi, Vice-president of Daikin Europe says: “As an industry, we are only at the start of our journey to create a circular economy of refrigerant supply, usage, recovery and reclamation. We highly value Action and the fact that they are open to take initiatives that will change the retail and HVAC market. We hope to inspire many others to make the same positive choice and to help us to recover the huge quantity of available refrigerant in existing installations.”
Reclaimed Refrigerant Certified stores
After the successful completion of this pilot project, Action and Daikin agreed to collect refrigerant gas from 50 Action stores which are planned to be refurbished in the coming months and reuse the reclaimed gas in newly built stores.
In this way, the new Action stores will fully support the circular economy of refrigerants, lowering their environmental impact and avoiding the production of new refrigerants.
With this initiative, Action and Daikin set a powerful example for all stakeholders both in retail sector and HVACR industry.
