When Ammonia Goes Wrong

Ammonia is the backbone of cold storage in Australian abattoirs, but it’s also toxic, corrosive, and unforgiving of small mistakes. A missing bolt, a punctured freezer coil, an alarm threshold set too high — the incidents keep following the same pattern, and regulators keep flagging the same root causes. With Australia’s Ammonia Workplace Exposure Limit tightening from 1 December 2026, we look at what’s actually going wrong on the plant room floor, and how detection built for the environment — not just the spec sheet — closes the gap.