The world gears up for World Refrigeration Day
23rd June 2022
UK: This year’s World Refrigeration Day (WRD) has created an unprecedented amount of interest with thousands of events taking place across the world over the next few days.
With World Refrigeration Day (June 26) falling on a Sunday this year, many businesses are taking the opportunity to hold events across the weekend including the workdays Friday and Monday.
As expected, this year, the first since the Covid lockdowns, World Refrigeration Day sees a mix of online and physical events, but the level of involvement and the number of events being organised has taken everyone by surprise. It seems certain that this year’s celebration will be the largest since the inaugural WRD in June 2019.
Such has been the avalanche of notifications of activities received by the World Refrigeration Day secretariat, that founder Steve Gill has been forced to suspend posting events on the WRD website.
“When I checked this morning on the number of events submitted for listing, I was both delighted and shocked in equal measure. I counted 1,917,” Steve Gill revealed. “With events coming in throughout the day I am certain that there will be more than two thousand around the world, and based upon experience I would guess that we aren’t aware of most of them. In many of the countries that don’t use English as a first language we are often not informed in advance and only find out later, if at all.
“This has created both a practical issue of vetting and uploading the events onto the website, and a dilemma for us, because it is unrealistic for us to be able to list them all so we will unfortunately have to exclude many, possibly most, which is obviously an undesirable outcome. We have therefore made the decision to list none. We will share what we can via social media but with our limited resources I think this is the right decision at this time.”
When asked to estimate or predict how many events will take place for WRD this year, Steve was hesitant to even guess at a figure. “It is impossible to say. It feels like everywhere we look; we find that something is happening. Often these are small events, such as open days or school visits, but also industry conferences and community outreach, together with countless webinars. For example, I have been astonished, just how many events are happening across the African continent this year, but actually, it feels like everywhere.”
The World Refrigeration Day secretariat will, however, invite people to share photos or details from events so that these can be shared afterwards.
