Last September, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule that would rescind the provisions regarding maintenance and leak repair to appliances that contained 50 or more pounds of substitute refrigerants such as HFCs. Basically, the proposed rule would roll back parts of Section 608 of its Refrigerant Management Regulations as it applies to HFCs.
The EPA had previously updated Section 608 in November 2016, extending the requirements that had applied only to refrigerants containing an ozone-depleting substance (ODS) to nonexempt substitute refrigerants such as HFCs. Since the Court of Appeals ruled in 2017 that the EPA could not ban HFCs, the agency decided that it also did not have the authority to regulate these refrigerants under Section 608.