Officine Mario Dorin, has joined the North American Sustainable Refrigeration Council (NASRC) as a silver member. The NASRC is a 501c3 nonprofit focused on taking action to eliminate the barriers slowing the widespread adoption of natural refrigerants in supermarket applications.
Dorin is a 100 year old company (established in 1918), and is still run by the Dorin family. The company has worked in the refrigeration industry since 1932, and began to manufacture semi-hermetic compressors in 1957. Today, compressors are the core to their business and are used in a wide variety of applications, including the food retail, transportation, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industries worldwide.
Dorin began to develop compressors for CO2 transcritical systems in 1991, and has since contributed to tremendous progress of CO2 refrigeration. Today, the company has over 60,000 Dorin CO2 compressors in operation around the world. Dorin has also actively contributed technical support to define engineering standards for CO2 throughout Europe. More recently, Dorin has begun to expand their presence in the U.S. market, where CO2 continues to be a large part of their business.
“The USA and North American markets are becoming more and more interested in natural refrigeration following the global trends of reduction of GWP of refrigerants,” said Giovanni Dorin, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer for Dorin. “We have decided to invest in the North American market because we believe that our customers have the right to have closer support, especially now with the rise of CO2 as a refrigerant. Therefore, the establishment of Dorin USA LLC is the natural step to show our commitment to the American market players.”
Natural refrigerants, including carbon dioxide (CO2), ammonia (NH3) and hydrocarbons, have extremely low global warming potentials (GWPs), and as a result are considered “climate-friendly.” Recent regulations at the global, federal, and state levels have caused more supermarkets to consider natural refrigerant technologies.
However, only a small percentage of the U.S. market has adopted natural refrigerant equipment due to a unique set of market barriers, including upfront costs, lack of trained service contractors, and uncertainties around lifecycle costs. The NASRC works directly with Dorin and over 120 other industry stakeholders to address and remove these barriers.
“Dorin has shown great leadership in advancing natural refrigerants worldwide,” said Danielle Wright, Executive Director of the NASRC. “We are very excited to leverage their expertise to accelerate progress in North America.”
In addition to manufacturers like Dorin, NASRC members represent other commercial refrigeration industry stakeholders, including service contractors, consultants, engineering firms, trade associations, nonprofits, refrigerant distributors, and over 22,000 supermarket locations in North America.