UK: Leading Swedish household appliance manufacturer Electrolux has been fined a total of £56,700 by the UK Environment Agency for breaches of the European F-Gas Regulation.

Its UK subsidiary Electrolux Plc was fined £52,500 for selling fluorinated greenhouse gases to companies that did not have the relevant F-gas certificates and for failing to keep records of F-gas sales. In addition, its parent company Electrolux Appliances AB was fined £4,200 for placing F-gases on the market in illegal, non-refillable cylinders.

In January 2023, the Cooling posts revealed that Electrolux was offering R134a refrigerant through its UK spare parts website. Without F-Gas certification Cooling posts managed to purchase a 900g cylinder of R134a gas, described as ‘rechargeable’, despite the fact that there was no deposit on the cylinder and no apparent systems were in place to ensure that the cylinder could be returned for refilling, as required by the F-Gas Regulation.

It was found that R134a was also offered on a number of Electrolux’s European websites, including those for Spain, Portugal and Poland. The gas was also offered on the website of Electrolux subsidiary Zanussi in the UK. Our own investigations also found that the gas had been available on some of these websites for more than 12 months.

The gas supplied was the Nevada brand of Italian company Mariel Srl. In another case, according to the Environment Agency report, Mariel was also fined £3,000 last year for failing to achieve a sufficient HFC quota before placing HFCs on the UK market.

According to recent figures, the Environment Agency imposed civil penalties totalling over £2.23 million over the past 12 months for a total of 64 breaches of fluorinated greenhouse gas regulations.

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