Why R-410A Costs What It Costs Now

The short version

The price of R-410A comes out of a federal cap that is counted in carbon dioxide equivalent rather than in pounds. The American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act of 2020 limits how much hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerant may be produced and imported in the United States each year, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) runs that limit with allowances a producer or an importer has to spend to make the refrigerant or bring it into the country. Every regulated HFC has an exchange value fixed in the law, the allowances a pound uses scale with that exchange value, and R-410A uses about four and a half times what the same weight of R-454B uses. The cap has not tightened since January 1, 2024, and the next step down does not arrive until January 1, 2029, so a price move in 2026 is coming from demand, from import duties and from what distributors are holding rather than from a fresh federal cut. The customer pays for the confusion two ways: a homeowner told that R-410A is banned buys a replacement system instead of a repair, and a homeowner sold a top-off instead of a leak repair buys the same refrigerant again next season, under a federal cap with three scheduled reductions still in front of it, on January 1 of 2029, 2034 and 2036.

Quote the refrigerant as its own line, by the pound, at what it costs you on the day you write the proposal. The cost of a recharge is now a large enough share of a service ticket to argue about, and the arguments are easier to have before the work than after it. The rest of this post is what sits behind that number, in the order it reaches your invoice.

What you are buying when you buy a jug

The AIM Act gave the EPA a ceiling and a currency to enforce it with. The currency is the allowance, and the EPA describes it in one sentence on its allowance page: “EPA uses an allowance as the unit of measure that controls production and consumption of bulk HFCs.” Nothing in that system tells a chemical producer which refrigerant to make. It tells the producer how much may be made in total, counted in a single unit that spans every HFC on the list.

The EPA’s allowance page gives four kinds: production allowances, consumption allowances, application-specific allowances and production for export allowances. The last two are narrow. Application-specific allowances cover production or import for specified allowed applications, and production for export allowances cover HFCs made for export in the same calendar year for semiconductor etching and cleaning. The first two are the general pool a newly produced or imported jug of R-410A runs through, and which of them gets spent depends on where the refrigerant came from. The EPA states that split plainly: “Entities must expend allowances in order to produce or import bulk HFCs. Producing HFCs requires expending both production allowances and consumption allowances. Importing HFCs requires expending only consumption allowances.”

The regulation has the arithmetic that matters to you. The federal refrigerant rules are in Title 40 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), and the phasedown is in Part 84. Section 84.5 allows an importer to bring in bulk refrigerant only while holding and expending “consumption or application-specific allowances in a quantity equal to the exchange-value weighted equivalent of the regulated substances imported.” Exchange-value weighted is the phrase that determines which refrigerants get expensive first.

The rest of the picture is two definitions in section 84.3. An exchange value is “The value assigned to a regulated substance in accordance with AIM Act subsections (c) and (e), as applicable, and as provided in appendix A to this part.” The exchange value equivalent, abbreviated EVe, is “The exchange value-weighted amount of a regulated substance obtained by multiplying the mass of a regulated substance by the exchange value of that substance.” So the national limits are denominated in metric tons of exchange value equivalent, written MTEVe, and a pound of refrigerant produced or imported draws on them in proportion to the exchange value of what is in it.

Allowances also move between companies, and the movement is not free. Section 84.19 requires that “An offset equal to five percent of the amount of allowances transferred will be deducted from the transferor’s production allowance balance,” with the same five percent applied on the consumption side. Note whose balance that comes out of. The transferor loses the transferred amount plus the offset, so every transfer that gets a company to a bigger production run takes an extra twentieth of the transferred amount out of the pool on the way there.

The EPA is studying that market now. Its July 2026 notice of data availability has a direct question for the industry: “There are a sizeable volume of allowance transfers each year, with some entities being substantial net recipients of allowances compared to the number of allowances they were issued and others transferring away all of their allowances; what might be driving these trends?”

The last piece is what the cap does not say. Section 84.7 limits “Total production and consumption of regulated substances in the United States in each year,” and no individual refrigerant appears anywhere in it. There is no R-410A quota and no R-32 quota. Producers decide the mix inside aggregate production and consumption limits that span every regulated HFC at once, which is the reason R-410A and R-32 have moved so differently in price while sitting under the same law.

Why R-410A is the expensive one

Appendix A to Part 84 lists the HFCs the AIM Act regulates and gives each one an exchange value. HFC-32, chemical formula CH2F2, carries an exchange value of 675. HFC-125, chemical formula CHF2CF3, carries 3,500. Those two numbers are most of this post.

R-410A is nominally half of each. The Commerce Department described it in the 2016 antidumping duty order on refrigerant blends as “R-410A, a zeotropic mixture of 50 percent Difluoromethane and 50 percent Pentafluoroethane,” and the same order adds that “The foregoing percentages are nominal percentages by weight. Actual percentages of single component refrigerants by weight may vary by plus or minus two percent points from the nominal percentage identified above.”

Difluoromethane is the chemical name for HFC-32 and pentafluoroethane is the chemical name for HFC-125, so a jug of virgin R-410A is a nominally even mix by weight of one of the least expensive HFCs used in comfort cooling refrigerants and one of the most expensive substances on the entire regulated list. What comes back out of a system into your recovery tank is a different question, and not one to answer by assumption.

Run the exchange values against that split. Half of 675 is 337.5, half of 3,500 is 1,750, and the sum is 2,087.5. That figure matches what the EPA published in the Federal Register, describing “R-410A, a refrigerant blend that has a GWP of 2,088 and consists of two HFCs regulated under the AIM Act.” Global warming potential, abbreviated GWP, is a refrigerant’s warming effect measured against carbon dioxide, and for the HFCs on the AIM Act list the exchange value is that same figure used as a unit of account.

Now do the comparison the market is actually making. R-454B is described in the EPA’s own listing rule as “a blend consisting of 68.9 percent HFC-32 and 31.1 percent HFO-1234yf.” HFO-1234yf is a hydrofluoroolefin, a refrigerant family the AIM Act list does not cover, and Appendix A does not include it. Only the HFC-32 portion of R-454B draws on allowances, and 0.689 multiplied by 675 is 465.075, which the EPA publishes as 465 in its technology transitions GWP reference table.

Refrigerant	What is in it, by weight	Exchange value per pound of product	Pounds per metric ton of exchange value equivalent
R-410A	Nominally 50 percent HFC-32, 50 percent HFC-125	2,087.5	1.06
R-32	100 percent HFC-32	675	3.27
R-454B	68.9 percent HFC-32, 31.1 percent HFO-1234yf	465	4.74

The right-hand column is the finding, and it is worth following the arithmetic rather than taking it. One metric ton of exchange value equivalent divided by an exchange value of 2,087.5 leaves 0.479 kilograms of R-410A, which is 1.06 pounds. The same metric ton divided by 465 leaves 2.15 kilograms of R-454B, which is 4.74 pounds. A producer or importer spending an identical amount of exchange value equivalent can put four and a half times as much R-454B by weight into the country as R-410A, because the allowances are expended to produce or import rather than at the counter where the jug is sold.

Put it on the cylinder in your van. A 25 pound jug holds 11.34 kilograms, and 11.34 multiplied by 2,087.5 comes to 23,672 kilograms of exchange value equivalent, or about 23.7 metric tons. Filling that same jug with R-454B uses about 5.3 metric tons. Two cylinders of the same size and the same weight, and one of them draws four and a half times as hard on the thing that is actually scarce.

Allowances are one input and not the whole invoice. Raw material costs, import duties, packaging, freight and what a distributor thinks next quarter looks like all come on top. What the allowance arithmetic explains is the direction and the ranking: under limits that count every regulated HFC in the same unit, the refrigerant with the highest exchange value is the one supply tightens on first, and R-410A has the highest exchange value of anything moving in residential volume.

The cap has not moved since 2024

The schedule is published law and it is short. Section 84.7 states that “Total production and consumption of regulated substances in the United States in each year cannot exceed the amounts (shown as a percentage of baseline) in the following table,” and the table runs like this.

Years	Percentage of production baseline	Percentage of consumption baseline
2022 to 2023	90	90
2024 to 2028	60	60
2029 to 2033	30	30
2034 to 2035	20	20
2036 and after	15	15

The baselines those percentages apply to are also in the section: a production baseline of 382,535,439 metric tons of exchange value equivalent and a consumption baseline of 302,538,316. At 60 percent, that works out to 229,521,263 MTEVe of production and 181,522,990 MTEVe of consumption, and those are the figures the EPA allocated for calendar year 2026 in its November 2025 notice. The 2026 pool is the same size as the 2025 pool and the same size as the 2024 pool, because all three years sit inside one step.

That matters for what you tell a customer, because the common explanation is wrong. The 2026 price of R-410A is not the result of a cut that happened in 2026. The last cut happened on January 1, 2024, when the cap fell from 90 percent of baseline to 60. The next one arrives on January 1, 2029, when it falls from 60 percent to 30, and that one halves both national limits in a single step.

What did change recently is the demand side. On May 21, 2026 the EPA finalized a rule removing the January 1, 2026 deadline for installing R-410A residential and light commercial systems, which put that equipment back into new installations.

Read the eligibility line before you rely on it. The rule’s own text defines which components are specified. The rule covers equipment “that was manufactured in the United States or imported into the United States before January 1, 2025,” and it removes the deadline “where all specified components of such systems were domestically manufactured or imported before January 1, 2025.” The date attaches to when a component was built here or landed here, not to when it was built somewhere.

The EPA wrote the consequence into the final rule itself: “In addition, this action may result in increased demand for HFCs. This in turn may result in tighter supply and higher HFC prices for downstream consumers, including users of HFCs in subsectors outside the scope of this final rule.”

Read that for what it says. The agency wrote it about “this action,” meaning the final rule as a whole rather than the residential provision on its own, and the rule itself gives no number for how much extra demand the residential piece accounts for. The bulk refrigerant those systems will be serviced with comes out of limits that do not grow at any point either: they stay at 60 percent of baseline through 2028 and then fall to 30.

Three contractor and distributor associations pressed the same supply and price concern, though not at the residential provision. The Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA), Heating, Air-conditioning and Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI) and the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association (PHCC) filed a petition for judicial review of that rule in the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The split matters: the three support the part that lifted the installation prohibition on existing split system residential and light commercial equipment, and they are challenging the part that extended deadlines for commercial refrigeration. Writing in June 2026, ACCA put the projection this way: “EPA’s own analysis projects a 12 to 24% increase in U.S. refrigerant prices by 2029,” alongside its statement that “HARDI estimates $13 billion in added costs for the refrigeration subsector alone.” The first figure is attributed to the agency’s own analysis and the second is HARDI’s estimate, and both are projections rather than a published schedule. The schedule is the table above.

The other charges that reach the invoice

Import duties on the Chinese route. The 2016 antidumping duty order includes R-410A in its scope, and it is still in force. Commerce set a rate of 101.82 percent for the exporters that qualified for a separate rate and 216.37 percent for what the order calls the PRC-Wide Entity, and in February 2022 the department wrote that “Commerce hereby orders the continuation of the Order.” The duties also cover the expensive half of the blend on its own. Antidumping and countervailing duty orders on pentafluoroethane, which is HFC-125, took effect in March 2022, and in the administrative review published in July 2025 Commerce set a preliminary weighted-average dumping margin of 60.08 percent for the Zhejiang Sanmei group. Both the finished blend and its costlier component carry duties on the cheapest import path, which is a US-specific reason a US price sheet reads the way it does.

Who is allowed to sell it to you. Section 82.154 of Title 40 prohibits any person from selling or offering “any non-exempt substitute for use as a refrigerant” unless one of nine conditions is met. Which one covers you depends on who is buying. A technician buying in their own name meets the first, that “The buyer has been certified as a Type I, Type II, Type III, or Universal technician under § 82.161.” A shop can meet the second instead, which asks that the buyer “employs at least one technician who is certified as a Type I, Type II, Type III, or Universal technician under § 82.161 and provides proof of such to the seller.” A wholesaler meets the fifth, which is narrower than it sounds: it asks that the refrigerant be sold only for eventual resale to certified persons or to appliance manufacturers, so a wholesaler saying “for resale” does not by itself meet that condition. Sellers pass that obligation along at checkout. One online seller requires the buyer to affirm: “I hereby certify that the cylinders of refrigerant that I am purchasing are being purchased solely for the purpose of reselling to or will be installed by an EPA certified technician.”

The cylinder you throw away. Section 84.116 covers disposable cylinders as of January 1, 2028. Three things have to be true at once for it to apply: the cylinder holds a regulated substance, it was used in servicing, repair or installation, and you do not intend to use it again.

A cylinder that meets all three has to go to a certified reclaimer, a final processor able to remove the heel, or a refrigerant supplier able to remove it, with a fire suppressant recycler as a fourth route open only to cylinders used on fire suppression equipment. An entity that receives a cylinder through one of those four routes “must remove all remaining contents from the disposable cylinder prior to discarding” it.

The heel is the refrigerant left behind when a cylinder reads empty. A certified technician can take the cylinder out of that chain instead, by evacuating the heel to a vacuum of 15 inches of mercury and signing a certification for the final processor. A cylinder handled that way may go to a final processor without meeting either the routing requirement or the removal requirement. Budget the handling, because after that date the empty jug is not scrap metal on its own terms.

What a jug actually listed for on one day. On September 2, 2026, one online seller listed a 25 pound cylinder of R-410A at $329.00 with a sale price of $279.00, and bulk tiers of $249 each for 10 cylinders, $229 each for 20 and $199 each for 40. A second seller listed the same size at $259.99 for a single cylinder and $220 each at 40, with its listings showing as unavailable. That is $11.16 a pound at the first seller’s sale price and $7.96 a pound at its deepest tier. Those are two internet list prices on one day rather than a market index, your distributor counter will quote you something else, and published per-pound figures for R-410A vary by a factor of five depending on who is publishing them and whether they are quoting wholesale cost or an installed price to a homeowner. Do not budget from anyone’s blog, including this one.

What reclaimed refrigerant does to the math

Refrigerant reclaimed in this country is outside the cap, and that is a matter of definition rather than an exemption someone granted. Section 84.3 defines production as manufacture from a raw material or feedstock chemical, then states that the term does not include “The reclamation, reuse, or recycling of a regulated substance.” Recovering refrigerant from a system here and reprocessing it here is not a fresh act of production or import in the sense the rule means, so no allowances are expended to put it back on a shelf. Every pound of R-410A that comes back through domestic reclamation is a pound of supply that the phasedown schedule does not touch.

All of that describes the domestic loop. Reclaimed refrigerant is not carved out of the cap by being reclaimed. Section 84.5 covers bulk regulated substances coming into the country whatever their history, and the exceptions it lists are for material headed to transformation, to destruction or straight back out as transhipment.

Reclaim has a specific meaning and it is not the same as recovery. Section 84.3 defines it as “The reprocessing of regulated substances to all of the specifications in appendix A to 40 CFR part 82, subpart F (based on AHRI Standard 700-2016).” AHRI Standard 700 is the purity specification published by the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, and meeting it requires laboratory analysis by a certified reclaimer. Recovering refrigerant into a tank on your truck is the first step in that chain and not the finished product.

The volume is moving. The EPA reports that “In 2024, the data reported to EPA show an increase of approximately 30 percent in the total volume of HFCs reclaimed compared to 2023,” and that “Since 2021, there have been approximate year-over-year increases in reported HFC reclamation ranging from 20-40%.” The agency names what is driving it: “Currently, R-410A and HFC-134a are the most widely used HFCs for refrigeration and air conditioning and are the main drivers contributing to the large year-over-year increase in HFC reclamation.” HVAC School made the same point about where the pressure valve is when the phasedown started: “The law only ramps down the production of new R-410A, not existing R-410A.” Read that with imports counted in, because the cap reaches those too. Importing bulk HFCs expends consumption allowances, and it is refrigerant already in the country and lawfully held that neither half of the cap covers.

Two dates in the reclaim rules are worth carrying. As of January 1, 2026, section 84.112 states that “no person may sell, identify, or report refrigerant as being reclaimed for use in the installation, servicing, or repair of refrigerant-containing equipment if the regulated substance component of the resulting refrigerant contains more than 15 percent, by weight, of virgin regulated substance.” As of January 1, 2029, the same section requires servicing and repair to use reclaimed refrigerant in three equipment categories: supermarket systems, refrigerated transport and automatic commercial ice makers. Residential and light commercial air conditioning is not on that list, so nothing requires you to service a home system with reclaimed R-410A. What the requirement does is bring three commercial subsectors into the market for reclaimed supply starting in the same year the virgin cap halves.

The practical read for a shop is that recovered refrigerant can be worth money instead of nothing, though not automatically. The EPA is careful about it: “Depending on the type and condition of the used refrigerant, some reclaimers may pay you for it.” HVAC School put the direction of travel plainly in the same article: “That also means that there will be value in submitting refrigerant for reclamation.” Ask your distributor whether they pay for recovered R-410A and what condition they want it in, because that answer has changed more than once since 2024.

What to do with this on the truck

Price the refrigerant separately, and reprice it. A flat recharge fee written when a cylinder cost half of today’s price is a fee that loses money on every leaking system. Put the refrigerant on its own line at current cost per pound, and check the cost per pound against a current invoice rather than against memory.

Charge by weight and write the weight down. The charge you add is the charge you bill, and on a system whose refrigerant is a real cost, guessing at “a couple of pounds” is guessing at money. It also gives the next technician a record of how fast the system is losing refrigerant, which is the number that determines repair against replacement.

Repair the leak instead of scheduling the top-off. The federal leak repair requirements in section 84.106 apply as of January 1, 2026, and reach appliances with a full charge of 15 or more pounds. Residential split systems are outside the rule, but not because they are small. Section 84.106 excludes “Refrigerant-containing appliances used for the residential and light commercial air conditioning and heat pump subsector” as a category, whatever the charge weighs. The economics are another matter. A system losing three pounds a season is now an annually recurring charge on the customer’s account, at a price sitting under a federal cap with three scheduled reductions ahead of it.

Recover into a clean, dedicated tank. Some reclaimers pay for refrigerant they can process, depending on its type and condition, so what is in the tank determines what the tank is worth. Mixed refrigerant is not automatically worthless, and at least one reclaimer says so on its own buyback page: Hudson Technologies states that “We will pay for mixed refrigerants.” Keep R-410A recovery separate from anything else you recover anyway, so that what you hand over is a single known refrigerant rather than something that has to be sorted out first, and label the tank with what is in it and where it came from.

Give the customer the dates rather than the adjective. Servicing existing R-410A equipment is legal and stays legal, the refrigerant is still produced under the cap, and the schedule that matters to a homeowner sitting on a 12 year old system is January 1, 2029, when the national HFC cap drops from 60 percent of baseline to 30. That is a fact they can plan against, unlike a warning that prices are going up.

My take

The part of this that bothers me is not the price. It is that the two most common explanations a homeowner hears are both wrong, and both of them cost that homeowner money. “R-410A is banned” leads to the sale of a replacement system to somebody who needed a coil and a leak repair. “Prices are going up, so we should top it off while it is cheap” leads to the sale of a recurring charge on an unrepaired leak. The actual situation is duller and easier to plan for: a published schedule with a known step in 2029, a blend that draws on the national limits about four and a half times as hard as R-454B does, and a reclaimed supply that is growing fast enough to be worth the trouble of recovering properly. I would rather hand a customer the 2029 date and a repair quote than a warning and a top-off.

Common mistakes

Quote refrigerant as its own line item at your current cost per pound, because a recharge fee set two or three years ago no longer covers what the cylinder costs today.
Tell a customer that servicing existing R-410A equipment remains legal, because the AIM Act caps how much HFC refrigerant is produced and imported rather than prohibiting the servicing of installed systems.
Name January 1, 2029 when a customer asks what happens next, because that is the date section 84.7 drops the cap from 60 percent of baseline to 30 percent.
Recover R-410A into a dedicated, labeled tank and ask your distributor whether they pay for it, because refrigerant reclaimed in this country is outside the production cap and the reported volume of reclaimed HFCs grew about 30 percent in 2024 over 2023.
Check what a purchase actually requires of you, because 40 CFR 82.154 allows the sale of a non-exempt substitute refrigerant only under listed conditions, one of which is that the buyer holds a Type I, Type II, Type III or Universal certification.

Don’t

Do not tell a customer that a 2026 price increase came from a 2026 federal cut, because the cap has been at 60 percent of baseline since January 1, 2024 and does not change again until January 1, 2029.
Do not treat R-410A and R-454B as interchangeable purchases with different labels, because a pound of R-410A expends about four and a half times the allowances a pound of R-454B expends under the same national cap.
Do not sell a top-off in place of a leak repair on the grounds that refrigerant is cheaper now than it will be, because the leak keeps the charge on a schedule the customer pays for every season.
Do not throw a disposable cylinder in the scrap bin after January 1, 2028 without dealing with the heel, because section 84.116 routes a covered cylinder to a reclaimer, a recycler, a final processor or a refrigerant supplier that has to remove the remaining contents before discarding it, unless a certified technician evacuates the heel to 15 inches of mercury and signs the certification for the final processor.
Do not budget from published per-pound prices, including the two seller listings in this post, because they are one day’s list prices and quoted figures for R-410A range across a factor of five depending on who is quoting and what the quote includes.

Frequently asked questions

Why did R-410A get more expensive?

R-410A is the highest exchange value refrigerant still moving in residential volume, and the AIM Act budget it draws on is shared across every regulated HFC. Its exchange value is 2,087.5, against 465 for R-454B, so each pound produced or imported consumes about four and a half times as much of the national cap. On top of that arithmetic are antidumping duties on Chinese blends and on HFC-125, and demand from an installed base that the EPA’s May 2026 rule enlarged when it removed the installation deadline for systems whose specified components were all manufactured in the United States or imported into the United States before January 1, 2025.

Is R-410A banned?

No. Servicing and repairing existing R-410A systems remains legal and the refrigerant is still produced and imported under the AIM Act cap. What the separate Technology Transitions rules restrict is the manufacture and import of covered new products using it, the sale, distribution and export of those products, and the installation of covered new systems. The phasedown in 40 CFR 84.7 limits total production and consumption of regulated HFCs, and no individual refrigerant appears in it. R-410A stays available for service because bulk HFC production and import continue under that cap, while the equipment rules push covered new residential and light commercial systems under a 700 GWP limit, which is the limit R-454B and R-32 are there to meet.

When does R-410A get more expensive again?

The next scheduled change is January 1, 2029, when 40 CFR 84.7 drops the cap from 60 percent of the baseline to 30 percent. Two more steps follow, to 20 percent in 2034 and to 15 percent in 2036. Between now and 2029 the cap does not move, so any price change in that window comes from demand, duties, inventory positions and the allowance transfer market rather than from the schedule.

Can I service a residential system with reclaimed R-410A?

Yes, and nothing requires you to. The reclaimed refrigerant requirement in 40 CFR 84.112 takes effect January 1, 2029 for supermarket systems, refrigerated transport and automatic commercial ice makers, and residential and light commercial air conditioning is not on that list. Reclaimed refrigerant has met the purity specifications in AHRI Standard 700 through a certified reclaimer, and since January 1, 2026 refrigerant sold, identified or reported as reclaimed for installation, servicing or repair may not have a regulated substance component that runs more than 15 percent virgin regulated substance by weight.

Should I stock up on R-410A now?

Stocking up is a bet on demand rather than a bet on the published schedule, because the cap stays at 60 percent of baseline through 2028 and only steps down in 2029. Inventory also comes with costs that a price chart does not show: cash tied up in cylinders, storage, and the disposal handling that section 84.116 attaches to disposable cylinders starting January 1, 2028. If you do buy ahead, buy from a source that can document where the refrigerant came from.

Glossary

ACCA: the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, a contractor trade association.
AHRI Standard 700: the refrigerant purity specification, published by the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, that reclaimed refrigerant has to meet.
AIM Act: the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act of 2020, the law that phases down US production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons. Consumption is the term that carries imports, which is why an importer expends consumption allowances.
Allowance: the unit the EPA uses to control HFC production and consumption, which a producer or importer must expend to make or bring in bulk refrigerant.
Antidumping duty: an import duty imposed when a product is sold in the United States below its normal value.
CFR: the Code of Federal Regulations. The HFC phasedown is at Title 40, Part 84, Subpart A. The Section 608 handling rules sit at Part 82, Subpart F, and the AIM Act carries handling rules of its own at Part 84, Subpart C, titled Management of Regulated Substances, which is where leak repair, reclamation and disposable cylinders live.
Countervailing duty: an import duty imposed to offset a subsidy paid to a foreign producer.
Exchange value: the value the AIM Act assigns to each regulated HFC, listed in Appendix A to Part 84.
Exchange value equivalent (EVe): the mass of a regulated substance multiplied by its exchange value, reported in metric tons and abbreviated MTEVe.
GWP: global warming potential, a refrigerant’s warming effect measured against carbon dioxide.
HARDI: Heating, Air-conditioning and Refrigeration Distributors International, the distributors’ trade association.
Heel: the refrigerant left in a cylinder after it has been emptied in normal use.
HFC: hydrofluorocarbon, the chemical family the AIM Act regulates. Appendix A to Part 84 lists 18 individual HFCs, among them HFC-32, HFC-125 and HFC-134a. R-410A is not on that list itself, because it is a blend of two compounds that are.
HFC-125: pentafluoroethane, nominally half of R-410A by weight, exchange value 3,500.
HFC-32: difluoromethane, nominally the other half of R-410A by weight and most of R-454B, exchange value 675.
HFO: hydrofluoroolefin, a refrigerant family that includes HFO-1234yf and that the AIM Act list does not cover.
PHCC: the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association.
Phasedown: the schedule in 40 CFR 84.7 that reduces allowed US HFC production and consumption to 15 percent of baseline by 2036.
Reclaim: reprocessing recovered refrigerant to the AHRI Standard 700 specifications. Section 82.164 puts that duty on “All persons reclaiming used class I or II refrigerant or non-exempt substitute refrigerant for sale to a new owner,” so anything sold on as reclaimed has to come from a certified reclaimer.
Recovery: removing refrigerant from a system into a tank, which is the step before reclamation and is not the same thing.
Virgin refrigerant: section 84.102 defines a virgin regulated substance as one “that has not had any bona fide use in equipment,” which is what separates it from reclaimed refrigerant. Whether it was made here or imported does not enter into it.

Drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by the author.

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