Expanded Total Equivalent Warming Impact analysis on experimental standalone fresh-food refrigerator

•Application of new environmental index for Vapour Compression Cycle system.•Impact of cold chain for fresh food.•Direct and indirect emissions evaluation of a stand-alone refrigerator.•Expanded Total Equivalent Warming Impact analysis for different Countries. The stand-alone refrigerators for fresh food storage represent a large part of supermarket refrigeration equipment. In these devices, the usage of refrigerants with low Global Warming Potential allows the mitigation of the direct emissions due to refrigerant leakages. In contrast, the indirect emissions in these components are highly dependent on the refrigerant charge, leakage, and equivalent emission factors related to the electricity production mix. The most used index to evaluate the environmental impact of refrigerators is the Total Equivalent Warming Impact. Despite that this index presents limits on the fixed evaluation of many parameters such as refrigerant charge, electricity consumption and, electricity emission factor. Otherwise in this study, an accurate evaluation of refrigerators emissions has been realised by using the innovative Expanded Total Equivalent Warming Impact method to an experimental stand-alone refrigerator by using a dynamic approach to evaluate direct and indirect contributions. The environmental analysis considers four different refrigerants and four different countries of location. The results show that the indirect emissions due to electricity consumption cover the highest share of emissions. In addition, the operating years affected by low refrigerant charges are responsible for emissions by greater than 25% compared to other ones. The hourly equivalent emissions due to electricity consumption in countries characterized by an electricity generation mix mainly based on renewable and/or nuclear plants show an indirect environmental impact up to 5 times lower than countries with a natural gas-based electricity production mix. The study also defines new strategies to reduce the environmental impact of the stand-alone refrigerator such as the use of photovoltaic systems combined with this technology or earlier maintenance processes that could determine an equivalent emission saving of up to 38%.