World Refrigeration Day Announces 2022 Theme: ‘Cooling Matters’

World Refrigeration Day (WRD) has announced that its 2022 theme is “Cooling Matters,” aiming to stress the importance of cooling in a wide variety of daily areas like food, data centers, medicine and air conditioning.

The announcement was made by WRD Founder Steve Gill during a side event at the AHR Expo in Las Vegas, held January 31 to February 2. WRD takes place on June 26 – Lord Kelvin’s birthday –  every year.

“Cooling is at the very heart of modern life,” Gill said. “It enables people to live and work comfortably, it saves lives [and] it enables people to achieve. The need for cooling is everywhere; it touches lives in fantastic, though often unnoticed ways. However we look at it, cooling matters to us.”

In a statement, the WRD secretariat added that “despite policies, standards and codes related to the refrigeration and air-conditioning industry, there is still significant lack of public understanding of cooling’s importance even though issues like refrigerant transition, emissions reduction, and maximizing energy efficiency have been addressed for decades by governments due to global policies and binding international frameworks.”

Therefore, “our objective is to make the public aware of cooling’s essential benefits, how cooling impacts daily life and how technology choices foster the environmental well-being of future generations,” Gill added in Las Vegas. 

In 2022, World Refrigeration Day has partnered with a variety of industry stakeholders, including the United Nations Environment Programme, ASHRAE, the European Partnership for Energy and the Environment, the Federation of Ibero-American Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Associations, the Global Food Cold Chain Council, the International Institute of Refrigeration, the Indian Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers and the Union of Associations of African Actors in Refrigeration and Air Conditioning.

WRD was launched in 2019, and themes of previous years have included “Cool Careers,” the cold chain, and refrigerants that protect the ozone layer.

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