A policymaker at the workbench: Hands on with natural refrigerants

I joined the Cool Training (8 June-12 June, 2026) at the Bundesfachschule Kälte-Klima-Technik (BFS), the German national training school for refrigeration and air conditioning, in Maintal. The course was built for policymakers, not technicians. Yet it still put real tools in our hands. I cut and flared copper pipe. I tried brazing a joint while nitrogen flowed through the tube to keep the inside clean. I watched how a technician hunts for a leak. The pipe was clamped in a blue vice. The torch in my right hand made a small, steady blue flame. In my left I held a thin rod of brazing alloy. The instructor's rule was simple, that is do not melt the alloy with the flame, let the heated pipe melt the alloy for you. I moved the flame in slow circles, watched the copper change colour, touched the rod to the joint, and saw it pull itself into the gap. It was the first time in my career that a climate policy turned, very briefly, into something I could see with my own eyes.  Best of all, I was not alone. I sat alongside an amazing crew from GIZ, the United Nations Development Programme and governments from around the world. Same challenge, many countries, one classroom. I will not pretend I came home a skilled fitter. What I gained was something a policymaker rarely gets. I could feel why every step in the work matters.

The most useful thing I carried home is simple. R-290 is not dangerous in the way I had feared. It is dangerous in a way that can be managed. Our instructors kept returning to three conditions for a fire. The gas has to escape, it has to mix with air within a narrow range, and it has to meet a spark or a hot surface. Take away any one of those and nothing happens. A trained technician removes all three out of habit. They empty the system, purge it with nitrogen, ventilate the room and keep ignition sources well away before they ever light a torch.

Bangladesh has a chance to leapfrog. Rather than moving from R-410A to R-32 and only later to something cleaner, our manufacturers can go straight to R-290. The climate case is obvious. The practical case depends entirely on people. There is also a quiet business case here, and our manufacturers have started to see it. R-290 units run roughly twenty per cent more efficiently than the R-32 split ACs most factories produce today, which translates directly into lower running costs for the customer and a stronger sales pitch on the shop floor. Going straight to R-290 also lets a manufacturer skip an expensive intermediate retooling for R-32. The week in Maintal convinced me that the safety question is not a barrier. It is a skill, and skills can be built. We are building a training pipeline for around 250 technicians through national institutes, with a real effort to bring more women into the trade. Standing at that workbench in Maintal, I finally understood what the number means. Every safe installation, every leak-free joint, every properly evacuated system is one more reason for a manufacturer, a regulator or a customer to trust R-290. The technician is not at the end of this transition. The technician is the engine of it.

I returned to Dhaka not as a technician, but as a decision-maker who has felt what the work asks of the person doing it. When I sit in a meeting on standards, training or finance, I will picture the hand holding the torch. A policy that ignores that hand will not survive contact with a real installation. A policy built around it can carry R-290 safely into millions of Bangladeshi homes.