Government moves to shut out cars using R134a at the border

Federal officials used Wire & Gas 2026 to confirm that the government intends to prohibit new vehicles entering Australia charged with R134a. This will close a gap in the HFC phase-down that is already threatening to cause a supply crunch for refrigerant used to service existing equipment as bulk R134a import quotas tighten.

Wire & Gas 2026 attendees heard how R134a supply is tightening, that its price will keep rising, that the rewritten code of practice is close to publication and that the window for the industry to help shape new regulations opens in September.

A code written around classes, not gases

Friday evening belonged to the new Code of Practice. National Environmental Protection Agency assistant director of product emissions standards Terry Hammoud told delegates the rewrite was close to complete and sits with state and territory governments and a number of workplace health and safety agencies for final comment.

Click here to register for a hard copy of the new Code of Practice as soon as it is published .

“First and foremost, it’s a regulatory document,” Mr Hammoud said. “All automotive refrigerant handling licensees need to follow the licence conditions.”

The edition it replaces was published in 2008, and the one before that in 1991. The new code runs across the full lifecycle from manufacture and installation through servicing to decommissioning, and carries workplace health and safety content its predecessor did not, alongside commentary on whether a given refrigerant is regulated by the Commonwealth.

R1234yf is the case in point. It is not a scheduled substance under the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas Management Act, but it is mildly flammable and the code covers it anyway.

“It’s not one of our scheduled refrigerants, but it does have flammability issues,” Mr Hammoud said.

The new document is built around refrigerant safety classes (A1, A2L, A2 and A3) rather than named gases.

From the floor during the CoP panel session, VASA president Brett Meads said the reason was “we don’t know what’s coming tomorrow, but we do know whether it’s going to be an A1, an A2L, A2 or an A3”.

Refrigerant Reclaim Australia (RRA) general manager Kylie Farrelley suggested this would help future-proof the CoP and clarified that no refrigerant currently used in automotive work is toxic under the ASHRAE definition but what separates the classes is flammability.

Refrigerants Australia executive director and ARC chair Dr Greg Picker explained that the CoP falls beneath the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas Management Act and the regulations and above standards and guidelines, and that the regulations call it up as the most significant piece of technical information in the framework.

He described it as the keystone in the arch between regulation and practice and made the case for why a code exists at all rather than a shelf of standards.

“It’s completely unreasonable to say we’ve got this great bit of legislation, and to ask a community to meet the requirements of that legislation without knowing how,” he said.

An earlier attempt at the same update collapsed about a decade ago and flammability was one of the main reasons.

“It’s challenging. There are politics at play. There are different views,” Dr Picker said. It survived this time on the argument that a document which does not describe what technicians are actually seeing is not worth having.

VASA treasurer Ian Stangroome spent roughly 12 months on the rewrite alongside VASA director Greg Shoemark, Brett Meads and others on the VASA board, working from the 1991 and 2008 documents and a considerable amount of standards reading.

Throughout the process, Mr Stangroome stuck to the principle of a single code covering every refrigerant that comes through the workshop door.

“You can’t have a technician facing a refrigerant to work on and not understanding what to do with it because they don’t have the relevant document,” he said.
“The code is a minimum that you should do. This is not the maximum you should do in your workplace.”

Australian Automotive Aftermarket Association government relations and advocacy director Lesley Yates described the constraints at play when developing new codes of practice compared with updates to existing ones.

“Updating an existing code is problematic because it makes it difficult for us to add new bits in, because you’re stuck with the sections that you’ve got,” she said.

As the code is referred to in other legislation and picked up in skills training and standards, unwinding any of it has consequences elsewhere.

The Automotive Technician founder Jeff Smit told the panel about a recent service on a four-month-old BYD Sealion 7 that took 1700g of R1234yf and said price creates its own risk.

“There are going to be people in the industry that want to put something else in there rather than R1234yf because (they think) that’s going to do just as good a job, but it’s not really fit for the purpose,” he said.

He rated the shift to process and procedure over named refrigerants as a considerable improvement on the 2008 edition.

Asked what would change for a licence holder once the new CoP is published, Dr Picker said experienced technicians would not find a great deal that is drastically new because the document is built around process and that the harder job is elsewhere.

“The challenge for VASA, the challenge for the ARC, the challenge for the Department is to reach out to the people that aren’t in this room, that don’t understand the need and the desirability of following good procedure,” he said.

Click here to register for a hard copy of the new Code of Practice as soon as it is published

A new regulator

The team that regulates the import, trade and handling of HFC and ozone-depleting refrigerants sat inside the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) when work on the code began.

Since 1 July it has been part of the National Environmental Protection Agency, led by a chief executive and responsible for licences, approvals, compliance and enforcement. Policy and legislation stayed with the department.

Mr Hammoud said current project work is with end-of-life recyclers and wreckers, checking for unlawful disposal and whether waste and hazardous waste – batteries, lead, used and surplus tyres among them, along with refrigerants – are handled and exported correctly.

The approach is site visits and education rather than penalty. “It’s not based on trying to get people, trying to stick them with doing the wrong thing, but trying to look at everything and see their gaps and risks,” he said.

Reports can be lodged through a web form or by email to environment.compliance@nationalepa.gov.au , and can be made anonymously. “You can be anonymous, but you shouldn’t be undercutting people that follow the law,” said Mr Hammoud.

He also confirmed that in late 2024 the then department lodged a submission with the Mining and Automotive Skills Alliance on the Certificate II in automotive air conditioning technology, arguing that the phase-down is pushing lower-GWP alternatives into the fleet that require stronger training and equipment coverage. That submission is now with Commonwealth, state and territory governments for review.

The gap the phase-down never closed

DCCEEW director of atmospheric chemicals policy Dr Paul Taylor opened Saturday morning with the mechanism behind the R134a squeeze. The phase-down caps bulk refrigerant imports in cylinders but does not touch gas that arrives already inside equipment.

“There is a limitation to the phase-down, and it doesn’t include pre-charged equipment,” Dr Taylor said.

“So what does that mean? It means stuff that comes into the country that is already charged with refrigerant. So that obviously includes new vehicles.”

The result of all these vehicles still coming in charged with R134a is a service obligation that keeps growing while supply of refrigerant to service them shrinks. The quota is denominated in carbon dioxide equivalent rather than tonnes, so every kilogram of R134a consumes 1430kg of an importer’s allocation.

On that basis, R134a now accounts for 36 per cent of bulk imports (up from 25 per cent) and departmental projections show demand outstripping supply from late this decade.

Japan, the source of around 30 per cent of Australia’s vehicles, does not permit R134a in new vehicles sold in its own market, yet Japanese models still arrive here with R134a in them.

Meanwhile China, under no Montreal Protocol obligation to act yet, is imposing restrictions from 2029. The country’s biggest exporter to Australia is BYD, which charges vehicles with R1234yf.

Dr Taylor said the risk was that Australia came to be seen as “a dumping ground for high GWP equipment”.

IChEMS consultation is coming

The department’s answer is a set of standards under the Industrial Chemicals Environmental Management Standard (IChEMS), announced in March.

It extends the department’s reach beyond the substances controlled by the Montreal Protocol (the limit of its powers under the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas Management Act), which leaves out HFOs, hydrocarbons and R744 (carbon dioxide).

Public consultation opens in September, with the standards taking effect from 1 July 2027 and implementation dates for individual measures still to be settled.

Dr Taylor raised 2028 as a possible date for restrictions on new vehicles but admitted that nothing had been finalised. He said the measures target the import end rather than the workshop floor, but that for repairers it will get worse before it gets better.

R134a, he said, “is becoming more expensive. That will continue – I hate to say it, but it will continue.”

What is already in the cars

Sunday’s closing panel turned to what workshops are handling now. Ms Farrelley reported hydrocarbon contamination is running at three to four per cent across recent RRA under-bonnet surveys, which sample 500 to 550 vehicles each summer with help from VASA members.

Ms Farrelley said that, extrapolated against about 21 million registered vehicles in Australia, this meant close to 850,000 of them could be carrying some level of contamination.

“These all-in-one machines that we use – the cylinders inside aren’t changed. We’re potentially introducing contamination into other vehicles,” Ms Farrelley said.
“And you don’t know where the car’s been before it’s come to you.”

She added that about five per cent hydrocarbon is enough to make a full charge flammable.

ARC technical training manager Noel Munkman’s message was to put back what the manufacturer put in. He also brought up the hole in the licensing regime caused by R1234yf having no meaningful global warming potential, meaning it is not a controlled substance and sits outside the ARCtick scheme so can legally be sold in single-use cans from retail shelves.

“It can be sitting on shelves, that’s for sure, and it does happen,” Mr Munkman said, adding that retailers have been advised that doing so is not good practice but conceding that “legally they can do it”.

The Certificate II revision Mr Hammoud described will bring flammable refrigerants into the core of the qualification, with completion hoped for by the end of the year.

It does nothing for the 37,000 automotive air conditioning technicians already on the ARC register, for whom no formal gap training exists.

“You don’t have to retrain to keep the licence. There’s no continuing professional development required in that licence,” Mr Munkman said.

The ask

Dr Picker and Mr Meads closed the event with the same request: When the time comes for industry consultation on important things, such as the CoP and IChEMS, please have your say The consultation on the code of practice drew 57 responses from VASA’s membership and every allied organisation approached, yielding about 680 points of comment, to the department’s delight. The stationary sector’s equivalent consultation returned far fewer responses.

“When the government department puts up a policy for public and industry consultation, often a disappointingly low number of responses will be received during the review process,” Mr Meads said.
“Imagine if there were only seven, and your response is the eighth – your point will matter.”

Dr Picker echoed a warning Ms Yates had given two days earlier about volume of submissions being no substitute for quality.

“I’m happy to do the lifting. I need you to also do the lifting,” he said. “But most importantly, I need you to come to a conclusion about what it is you need lifting specifically, because the generic ‘we should do something’ doesn’t actually help. You need to ask for something.”

The IChEMS consultation opens in September and Dr Taylor said the department meant it: “If things are going to be problematic, if they’re not going to work, really please do reach out.”

If you have a view, updates on the consultation are available through ichems.enquiry@dcceew.gov.au.