Reclamation is in a rut. Shortly after the arrival of the Montreal Protocol, 25 years ago, came the 3 R’s: Recover, Recycle, and Reclaim. Service technicians would recover refrigerant to avoid fines for illegal venting. They’d then run the gas through an on-site recycling machine to clean it up a bit. But if they were not sure how pure the stuff they were planning to put back into the system was, they would put a virgin version of the same refrigerant into the system and send the old stuff to off-site reclamation facilities, to be brought back to the certified highest level of purity — ARI 700.
The reality is that in 2012, and thus far in 2013, few technicians and contractors are bringing R-22 back for reclamation despite an abundance of capacity at many reclamation facilities.