Teamwork, planning, communication - key to preventing synthetic refrigerant leaks and environmental harm for Samson NZ

Commercial property developers and managers Samson Corporation Limited have turned an accidental refrigerant leak into a great learning experience for their teams and contractors.

Samson Corporation Limited is a family run commercial property portfolio who have been property owners and developers in Auckland since the 1940s. They are committed to enhancing the neighbourhoods they have property in, improving wellbeing and reducing the impact on the environment.

Since 2009 any large Samson development has adopted sustainable designs achieving a minimum five Green Star rating with the New Zealand Green Building Council. They also use external certification tools, NABERS NZ and Toitū net carboNZero, to assess, benchmark and improve their environmental impact. 

In line with their commitment to reducing environmental harm, they recently used an accidental refrigerant leak at one of their properties to not only ensure they would prevent more accidents in the future, but to also improve their overall environmental management of refrigerants in their properties.

In 2021 a team of contractors were carrying out works at a Samson office, retail and residential property that used to be the home of the old Nestle factory in the 1920s (pictured). The beautiful art deco style building has been a key and well-known landmark in its Parnell neighbourhood for many years.

During these project works a contractor accidentally punctured a hole in the building’s energy efficient HVAC outdoor unit with a nail, releasing climate harming synthetic refrigerants into the atmosphere.

The Samson team and their contractors immediately stepped into action to minimise the impact. Through their already established process for monitoring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions, they quickly off-set the carbon equivalent emissions that had been made from the synthetic refrigerant release.

Over and above that, the Samson team wanted to take a deeper dive into the incident.

Bridget Pyc, Samson’s Property, Sustainability and Relations Advisor said they wanted to understand why the accident had occurred, what they could do to prevent it in the future, and explore any further things they could do to improve their refrigerant environmental management:

“It was really important to us that we used this accident as an opportunity to understand and learn how we could really improve and deliver a ‘best practice’ approach to refrigerant environmental management.

After reviewing the incident, firstly we realised there was more we could do to help our contractors understand where refrigerants were placed around our properties and the importance of ensuring they were protected and maintained effectively and safely.

We also identified including refrigerant maintenance and management in our development and property management planning and processes needed to be a priority.”

Bridget says helping the tenants of their properties understand the importance of refrigerant environmental care and their role in that was also a priority:

“Not only is it important that our Samson teams and contractors do their bit for refrigerant environmental management, but we recognised the positive impact educating and supporting our tenants could have as well.

We now include refrigerant maintenance as a requirement in our building leasing agreements, and guidance on why it’s important and how to approach that in our Building User Guides.

 I think the key is to make it as easy and accessible for people to do the right thing, whether you’re a contractor, one of our team or one of our tenants.”