BAGUIO CITY?Since 2007, businessman Jun Rafio?s refrigeration repair and supply shop here has been stacked to the roof with old tanks filled with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

His employees filled the tanks with CFCs sucked out of old refrigerators and air condition units used by motorists.

Rafio said space has become a luxury at his shop because of these tanks but they represent profits for an industry that the government is shaping to address global warming.

Rafio is president of a Cordillera-based refrigeration group that volunteered in 2007 to help clean up the environment.

CFC suckers

Filipinos first heard about the hole in the ozone layer and how their old refrigerators continue to puncture it, long before the public equated climate change with an increase in carbon levels emitted by man, Rafio said.

So the 16-member Cordillera Association of Aircon and Refrigeration Shops (CAARS) decided to extract CFCs from old or retired refrigeration equipment using a P100,000-grant coursed through the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB).

CAARS is composed of businessmen in their early 40s and 50s ?who all know why the planet needed saving,? Rafio said.

Many more shopkeepers dealing in refrigeration repair still needed convincing, he said. ?I?ve been going door-to-door to persuade some of the refrigeration shops in the Cordillera to join our cause. Some end up buying their own CFC equipment although they have not joined our group. But many still do not believe,? he said.

It was only recently when CAARS also realized that the clean-up business could be profitable, he said.

The government has promised to buy the CFCs for recycling once they complete a CFC recycling plant, Rafio said, but it has not computed how much each CFC tank costs.

But starting Jan. 1, 2010, the country will enforce a total import ban on appliances, vehicles and equipment that use CFCs, said Marie Pina Rodas, Ozone-Depleting Substances Cordillera officer of the EMB.

New market

This opens up a market for CFC clean-up facilities from motorists with old vehicles and equipment, Rafio said.

New vehicle registration rules also require motorists to outfit their vehicles with CFC-free air-conditioning units that CAARS-accredited shops now supply.

Rafio said these shops can retrofit 30 vehicles each day. To put up these shops, one needs an initial capital of P250,000, he said.

The CFC clean-up business is not the first government venture in climate change economics.

A group of Baguio women has been converting trash into trinkets for almost nine years now, and has already exported products to Europe.

Some of these products were displayed here this month during a recycling fair hosted by villages like Barangays Dontogan, San Carlos Heights, and Asin.

Soledad Valencia, 54, manager of the Dinnadang Ethnic Handicrafts, said she fills up P50,000 in monthly orders overseas for unusual products like placemats made of recycled newspapers.

Valencia said the garbage crisis plaguing major cities, like Baguio, can be solved if people realize the profits these discarded materials bring.

?The city should not even haul out the trash to a commercial landfill. Bring us all your trash,? she said. With a report from EV Espiritu, Inquirer Northern Luzon