5.1 Inventory Part 1 - Refrigerators and Freezers (Annex 3)
A review of Part 1 of the inventory reveals that large amounts of valuable programmatic information can immediately be obtained from the individual provincial pages and from the national summary page. It is clear, for example, that much existing cold chain equipment is already quite old, and is likely to be in need of upgrading and replacement in the very near future. The ‘year first installed’ column on each of the province pages enables the approximate age of each item of equipment to be determined, and it will be seen that many date from 2000, 1999 or even earlier. In many countries, a period of 10 years is usually considered to be the maximum economic working life for cold chain equipment, and for DPR Korea, given the conditions of use, this working lifetime is likely to be somewhat less. Thus, it can be seen immediately that many counties, cities and provinces are currently using equipment which has already reached the end of its economic working lifetime.
As a further indication of cold chain status, the ‘summary’ page of Annex 3 shows a total of 575 refrigerators and freezers of all types located throughout the 10 provinces, with the quantities for each individual model and brand listed by province, and by national total. The numbers of equipment items working and not working is also shown by province and by national total, from which it will be seen that overall, 16.2% of all cold chain equipment in the country is currently out of order. For solar-powered equipment alone, 38% of all refrigerators were not working, and if other damage is also taken into account, 40% of all solar-powered equipment, that was installed only in 2004, was either not working at all, or partially working but in need of repair. The amount of equipment currently not working varies considerably by province however, ranging from less than 8% of all equipment in North Hwanghae province, to almost 30% of all equipment in Kangwon. Therefore, the inventory allows for further analyses to be planned, investigations to be made, replacement plans to be drawn up, etc, for each province individually, as well as compiling these simply as national totals.
Another important finding of the inventory is that some items of equipment still operate using the old Chloro-Fluoro-Carbon (CFC) type of refrigerant gas, which is indicated in the ‘refrigerant gas used’ columns with the code ‘R12’, on each of the province pages. Following a number of environmental impact studies in the 1980’s, this type of gas was found to be highly damaging to the ozone layer around the earth, and it has been progressively phased out from all applications globally under international agreement, starting from 1989 4. Such dangerous gases are now no longer manufactured anywhere in the world, and countries formerly using such equipment have largely replaced them with items using more environmentally-friendly gases. One such replacement gas is the refrigerant type shown with the code ‘R-134a’ in the ‘refrigerant gas used’ columns on many of the province pages. Therefore, the inventory also allows the remaining items of equipment still operating with the dangerous ‘R-12’ type gas to be easily identified, and a plan for their replacement to be drawn up by province and summarised at the national level.