Cover Story
Keilly Witman Director, Refrigerant Management and Sustainability, H-E-B, U.S. Key NatRef Accomplishment: Creating a successful partnership between U.S. food retailers and the EPA via the GreenChill program; founding the North American Sustainable Refrigeration Council.
Before Keilly Witman became the first manager of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA's) GreenChill Partnership in 2007, the EPA had played a largely regulatory role in the U.S. supermarket industry.
“It seemed obvious to me [at the EPA] that natural refrigerants were the answer to our industry’s slow, stairstep approach of replacing one really bad refrigerant with a slightly less bad refrigerant,” said Witman.
But the aim of GreenChill was to offer food retailers an opportunity to voluntarily work with the EPA to reduce their leaks and consider alternative systems that use natural refrigerants. Witman became known as the “friendly face” of the EPA.
After leaving the EPA, Witman started her own consulting business, K W Refrigerant Management Strategy. She separately founded the North American Sustainable Refrigeration Council (see page 30) to overcome the hurdles that are standing in the way of broader adoption of natural refrigerants.
By the time Witman left the EPA five years later, GreenChill was a thriving program with the participation of a wide range of food retailers encompassing thousands of supermarkets. Many GreenChill retailers began installing systems that use natural refrigerants like CO 2 and hydrocarbons, which became a fasttrack to the platinum-level award in the GreenChill store certification program that Witman created.
When Lois Stirewalt applied to be Executive Director of the Ammonia Refrigeration Foundation (ARF) in 2016, she acknowledged that she knew nothing about natural refrigeration – but was willing and able to learn. She got the job at ARF, and found she was fascinated by natural refrigeration. “It is something real. It is important. It is how we feed people and it is green,” she said.
Lois Stirewalt Natural Refrigeration Advocate and Workforce Development Program Director, RETA and GCCA, U.S. Key NatRef Accomplishment: Recruiting former military personnel as refrigeration technicians, and helping to start a Women in Natural Refrigeration group.
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In her current role as Natural Refrigeration Advocate and Workforce Development Program Director for the Refrigerating Engineers & Technicians Association (RETA) and the Global Cold Chain Alliance (GCCA), Stirewalt has helped establish #REDWHITEandCOOL. This is a national initiative within the newly established RETA-Training Institute to recruit, train and hire transitioning military personnel for the natural refrigeration industry;
This past July, Witman joined H-E-B, a major regional food retailer in Texas (U.S.), as Director, Refrigerant Management and Sustainability. “We are probably most bullish about the use of propane self-contained cases, due to the energy efficiency of propane and the ability to use them to convert existing stores to natural refrigerants gradually,” she said. MG
a test program will launch in 2020. “Our transitioning men and women in the armed forces have the skills and character that we are searching for in natural refrigeration,” she said. She has also helped organize within RETA a networking group for women called WiNR (Women in Natural Refrigeration), which held its first breakfast at RETA’s conference in Texas in November 2018. WiNR is now a program/affinity group within the RETA-Training Institute, with plans to hold networking events at other trade shows. WiNR is supporting the efforts and accomplishments of women in the natural refrigeration industry. “There are a great number of women who own their own businesses,” noted Stirewalt. The group is encouraging an Alaskan female technician to become "the first woman ever" to become a RETA-Authorized Instructor (RAI). MG
January 2020 // Accelerate Magazine