This is incorrect. Every ounce of that stuff winds up outside eventually. Regulation can only put it off. It's a gas and it has to go somewhere. It's like trying to keep lithium out of landfills.
Please provide a source for this wild claim. Nothing winds up outside, unless it leaks. The gas can and does get reused indefinitely.
Additionally and just to put it in perspective, a typical AC Split-Setup contains around 1kg of R32 which would be equivalent to 677 kg of CO2 _if_ it would leak completely over the 20 years of usage (which it doesn‘t). That‘s equivalent of the CO2 contained in 285 liters of gasoline or about driving 3000 kilometers by car (for cars using 7-8 liters).
The expected leakage is 1-3 percent. So that‘s around 30 kilometers by car per year.
In reality, modern ACs are widely used for heating in winter (I am doing this myself) and help to reduce CO2 emissions compared to heating with oil or gas.
edit: I had to edit this twice. Actually the first estimate was correct.
I think the claim that all working fluid put into an AC ends up in the atmosphere is correct for now. Most AC decommissions I heard about involved venting the gas to the atmosphere. Given the high cost of labour everywhere, the zero labour option is the one we must expect.
There's no country AFAIK that sanctions AC equipment owners or anyone else for not disposing properly of all their working fluid at the end of the equipment's lifetime.
In the USA the EPA will fine you for intentionally venting refrigerants to the atmosphere instead of using a refrigerant recovery system for recovery/reuse/disposal.
AC equipment is replaced at the end of its lifetime and picked up by professionals. That's a fact.
And as I pointed out, even if it wouldn't be picked up and leak _completely_, then it would still be 50x less than the average car owner emits in the same timeframe.
Even a single season of heating a house with natural gas already emits more than a complete leak. And who is loosing sleep about that? Maybe those who install an AC for a 20x emission reduction. Not those baselessly claiming that AC are environmentally problematic.
Say 32 oz of refrigerant per car, 675x CO2 equivalence, if your car AC vents all the refrigerant it's like releasing 0.675 tons of CO2.
EPA says an average passenger vehicle releases 5 tons of CO2 per year, so if your AC lasts 10 years it's about 1% of your car's greenhouse gas emissions.
Leaks in a larger building AC would be worse, but I bet all the vibration and getting banged around by potholes makes the car systems a lot more prone to leaks than a stationary unit.
AFAIK Vehicles use flexible rubber pipes because the rigid copper pipes of fixed split ACs would not withstand the vibrations of a car. The downside of these more flexible pipes is that they leak more.
