New Yorkers for Cool Refrigerant Management’s biggest project of 2025 was working with the City of Kingston to develop a thorough inventory and refrigerant management plan for its municipal operations. Kingston had earned a grant from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Climate Smart Communities program to do this work, but after a couple years of efforts decided they needed to hire a consultant to complete the job. 

At NY4Cool, we worked with our parent organization, Sustainable Hudson Valley, which managed the business aspects of our work and also developed and implemented a community outreach campaign. 

The team of Kingston staff members who worked with us to complete the inventory played an invaluable role. When it came time to write the final report, they frequently requested clarifications for non-refrigerant specialists, which I hope makes the final report useful to a wider range of municipalities and organizations that wish to do more in the refrigerant management space. A copy of the report can be found here. There’s also a YouTube video of the report overview given to the Climate Smart Kingston Commission. Additionally, the official public Kingston webpage written for city residents can be found here.

The main findings of the report (spoiler alert!) were that Kingston could improve its refrigerant management by:

• Providing advice to department heads for maintaining and upgrading HVAC systems

• Working with refrigerant reclamation companies to potentially save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions

• Having a greater awareness of applicable federal and state refrigerant regulations

• Developing a robust motor vehicle air conditioning maintenance program, especially for heavy duty vehicles

• Implementing better refrigerant recovery practices for its consumer appliance recycling program

Before creating this report, I searched around and asked contacts for copies of other refrigerant management reports to serve as models, but was only able to find Tilden Chao’s capstone project at Yale University. Clearly there is a need for more refrigerant management reports to be published and publicly available, to make it easier for others who want to follow suit. If readers can point out other reports that are available, I would be delighted to learn about them, read them, and add links to them on this web page.

Lastly, please email with comments, questions and suggestions about the Kingston Refrigerant Inventory and Management Plan. I look forward to learning your thoughts and concerns.

– Michael Helme, Warwick, NY, May 2026