100 Ways to Reduce Your Impact

Step 84 Recycle AC coolent

When your car goes in for service, recycle your air conditioner coolant. Recycling is the environmentally friendly alternative because it keeps ethylene glycol and all the nasty stuff it picks up inside the cooling system out of the environment.

Only 15% is currently recycled. Lets make get that percentage higher!

This site gives good steps on how to recycle your coolant

Comments

[fwater]

#1 No ethylene glycol is found in refridgerants, and #2 another thin-air statistic. Dos suspenso. (two fail)

[SamuraiNinjaGuy]

Though, I have recycled my antifreeze...(took me like 4 hours to get it to pass through a coffee filter though, it had lots of dirt in it). And no, I did not then use the coffee filter for coffee.

[Shevyowner]

Your air conditioner uses freon, not radiator coolant such as ethylene glycol, but can be recycled just the same. By law, it has to be reclaimed, instead of vented to the atmosphere, but enforcement is always most of the battle. =) As valuable as R12 is, people are stealing it, so they can resell it. To vent it is not only bad for the earth, it is financially not very smart.

[SamuraiNinjaGuy]

Shevyowner is right, freon is one of those things that environmentalists already ensured would not be released into the environment without stiff penalties. Asking your serviceman if he breaks the law is rather silly. If he does, he will just lie to you. Hell, you can't throw away a fridge or freezer without first getting a qualified professional to remove the freon (we have to have some kind of special tag on ours to throw them out). Again, compliance isn't assured, but if you are planning to do something Illegal (and risk the heavy fines associated with it), I doubt an internet web page will be enough to dissuade you.