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Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Helping to Cool the Planet

Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont based ice cream maker, has announced the launch of a pilot project testing freezers using butane and propane that present great environmental benefits by minimising the freezer’s impact on global warming. The technology is currently allowed in every country except the US.

“This is an important step for our business which we hope will clearly demonstrate that a more environmentally friendly refrigeration technology can work in the US market,” said Walt Freese, Ben & Jerry’s CEO. “The technology is commonplace in Europe with literally millions of home and commercial units in place.”

Ben & Jerry’s engineer Pete Gosselin said: “We’ve been working on getting better refrigeration technology into our distribution networks in the US since 2001, and more specifically on hydrocarbon freezing for the past year.”

For now, the efforts from the team, including Ben & Jerry’s, Unilever, Greenpeace and others, can claim moderate success with approximately fifty freezers, with approval to test up to 2,000 freezers in the next few years.

“This climate-safe freezer will keep pints of Chunky Monkey and Cherry Garcia as cold as ever, but it’s also going to help cool our planet,” said John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA. “With hurricanes intensifying, tropical disease spreading, sea levels rising and polar bears going extinct, we need to make sure that what cools our ice cream, drinks and homes isn’t also melting the ice caps.”

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