Please provide a source for this wild claim. Nothing winds up outside, unless it leaks. The gas can and does get reused indefinitely.

I think the claim that all working fluid put into an AC ends up in the atmosphere is correct for now. Most AC decommissions I heard about involved venting the gas to the atmosphere. Given the high cost of labour everywhere, the zero labour option is the one we must expect.

There's no country AFAIK that sanctions AC equipment owners or anyone else for not disposing properly of all their working fluid at the end of the equipment's lifetime.

In the USA the EPA will fine you for intentionally venting refrigerants to the atmosphere instead of using a refrigerant recovery system for recovery/reuse/disposal.

Pretty good reddit thread about the realities of enforcement: https://www.reddit.com/r/HVAC/comments/ugg89h/people_who_hav...

AC equipment is replaced at the end of its lifetime and picked up by professionals. That's a fact.

And as I pointed out, even if it wouldn't be picked up and leak _completely_, then it would still be 50x less than the average car owner emits in the same timeframe.

Even a single season of heating a house with natural gas already emits more than a complete leak. And who is loosing sleep about that? Maybe those who install an AC for a 20x emission reduction. Not those baselessly claiming that AC are environmentally problematic.

That's illegal. Refrigerant from old A/C units must be collected and disposed of safely, typically through high temperature combustion.

This does release greenhouse gasses, but just normal CO2 not the extremely potent gases originally present.

If it's always reliably collected, why does every old vehicle need its AC unit recharged?

Say 32 oz of refrigerant per car, 675x CO2 equivalence, if your car AC vents all the refrigerant it's like releasing 0.675 tons of CO2.

EPA says an average passenger vehicle releases 5 tons of CO2 per year, so if your AC lasts 10 years it's about 1% of your car's greenhouse gas emissions.

Leaks in a larger building AC would be worse, but I bet all the vibration and getting banged around by potholes makes the car systems a lot more prone to leaks than a stationary unit.

AFAIK Vehicles use flexible rubber pipes because the rigid copper pipes of fixed split ACs would not withstand the vibrations of a car. The downside of these more flexible pipes is that they leak more.