The Brazilian government decided to speed up the subsidized replacement of 10 million old refrigerators over the next 10 years. The program, under debate for the past year, gained steam as a way to mitigate the effects of the financial crisis on the national refrigerator industry, where production has retracted in recent months after seeing production of five million units in 2008.

Older model refrigerators waste energy due to the deterioration of their insulation capacity, motors and compressors, renewable energy expert Aurelio Souza explained to Tierramérica.

The program is “interesting”, he said, because it will favor the poorest sectors of the population, reducing their electric bills, and will prevent unregulated discarding of old units, which leads to emissions of gases that destroy the ozone layer and contribute to climate change.