January 17, 2007

Food Lion Joins EPA’s GreenChill

Food Lion, with 1,200 stores in 11 Southeast and Mid-Atlantic states, has joined the Environmental Protection Agency’s new GreenChill partnership, pledging to go above and beyond regulatory requirements in protecting the ozone layer and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Food Lion will use new refrigeration technology that uses naturally occurring CO2 gas to refrigerate food product.

Food Lion has committed to:

• Requiring all new and remodeled stores to be ozone friendly in advance of Clean Air Act phase-out requirements. 
• Establishing an emissions inventory, which will be used to set emissions reduction targets.
• Participating in an industry/government research initiative to assess the performance of advanced technologies including the secondary loop system in its Montpelier, Virginia store.

At its Montpelier store in particular, Food Lion worked in partnership with Hill Phoenix, a designer and manufacturer of commercial refrigeration systems, to test and evaluate new refrigeration technologies that are kinder to the environment and offer better sustainability benefits.

This is Food Lion’s second store to use Second Naturetechnologies from Hill Phoenix. The first store, in Dinwiddie, Virginia, opened in early 2006 with a medium temperature secondary coolant system that uses water and glycol to refrigerate products. The second store, in Montpelier, is testing a low temperature system featuring CO2 to refrigerate low-temperature food products. Both systems will be tested together in a third location, Portsmouth, Virginia, which is scheduled to open in early 2008.

The EPA estimates that widespread adoption of best practices, improved equipment design and service, and advanced refrigeration technologies could reduce refrigerant emissions by 1 million metric tons of carbon equivalent per year, which is the equivalent of taking 800,000 automobiles off the road, and save over $12 million in operating expenses.

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