Chemicals Banned From Air Conditioners and Refrigerators Are Making a Comeback (theverge.com) 73
Chemicals that were banned after they punched a hole in Earth's ozone layer are still building up at an alarming rate in our atmosphere, according to research published today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The chemicals were once widely used in air conditioning and refrigeration but were supposed to be phased out globally by 2010. From a report: Scientists were surprised to find that concentrations of several types of those chemicals have climbed since then, reaching a record high in 2020. The culprit could be alternative refrigerants that were meant to replace the ozone-depleting substances, the new research suggests. An even bigger problem? Researchers can't find where all the chemicals are leaking from. The ozone layer has managed to make a remarkable recovery over the past few decades. If emissions continue to climb, however, it could counteract some of that progress and exacerbate climate change.
This is at least part of it (Score:5, Interesting)
Scientists discover the source of new CFC emissions [mit.edu]
This isn't all of them, but it's certainly a part.
Re:This is at least part of it (Score:5, Interesting)
China was my guess when reading TFS, too. Seems like anytime something gets banned as bad for the environment, China just looks the other way. Thing is though, the old CFC refrigerants were great in every aspect unrelated to chewing up the ozone. They weren't toxic, weren't flammable, were miscible with mineral oil (and a well-lubed compressor is a happy compressor), and ran at much safer operating pressures than some of today's refrigerants. In fact, until the environmental consequences were discovered, they were considered one of the greatest advancements in mechanical refrigeration.
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I expect there's a sizeable black market for CFCs at this point, keeping old equipment running. And the older the equipment, the worse it leaks. Especially when reputable people won't work on it.
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The question becomes, why not just generate a mountain of ozone and deliver it high in the atmosphere? We could easily counteract the effects of CFCs since none of the inputs are particularly r
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https://www.epa.gov/ozone-laye... [epa.gov]
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The question becomes, why not just generate a mountain of ozone and deliver it high in the atmosphere?
I had to answer this question as part of getting my EPA certificate to handle refrigerants. The problem is that CFCs break down to release free chlorine atoms when struck by UV, and that free chlorine causes a repeating chain reaction which destroys significant amounts of ozone before the chlorine is finally removed by natural processes.
Or, if you prefer it set to music, just imagine the arrow is the chlorine, and the bad guys are the ozone. [youtube.com]
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I read a paper some years ago about a proposal to do this. To be effective, the ozone has to be generated in the upper atmosphere, and it needs to be done in massive amounts. It basically isn't feasible.
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Because you would need unthinkable numbers of balloon carried ozone generators. Enough so that ozone generators falling out the sky and landing on people would probably become a common occurrence. The problem is that the effect of CFCs on the ozone layer is incredibly strong, and the effect of a single ozone generator would be very weak. Ozone is formed through an energetic process from interaction with UV light from the sun. There's about 173 exaWatts of power from the sun hitting the Earth at all times an
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The thing is, if you could actually cover that kind of area with solar power collectors and ozone generators, the ozone layer would not be relevant any more anyway. It would be much simpler to just cover the atmosphere in a solar filter that blocks UV long before you got to the point of actually harnessing that much energy. It's still such an unthinkably huge project compared to just not using CFCs any more that it's hard to see the point. So maybe you're just looking for a good excuse to do planetary-scale
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Well, you may have a point
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It isn't so much that ozone blocks UV. It's that UV interacts with the oxygen in the upper atmosphere causing the reaction that creates ozone from O2, which absorbs UV. The CFCs reduce the amount of energy absorbed by this reaction, and also accelerate the decay of ozone to O2. The result is that less UV energy is being absorbed because the CFCs act similarly to a catalyst.
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Old equipment is likely responsible for at least some of the increase.
When these chemicals were banned, there was little incentive to discard existing equipment that was already using them, but now these devices will be reaching such an age that they're either starting to leak, or are leaking due to unsafe disposal.
Re: This is at least part of it (Score:1, Troll)
Like anything highly efficient we end up deciding to ban it. Then we go around complaining there is nothing efficient.
CFCs, Diesel, Asbestos, etc.
Re: This is at least part of it (Score:4, Insightful)
CFCs have been banned for a long time now. Efficiency standards are going up at the same time old refrigerants are being banned. Some replacement refrigerants are more efficient but previously not used because of other characteristics, like flammability, toxicity, or being zeotropic mixtures. Many replacements are only inefficient if you try to retrofit them into existing systems that were designed for older refrigerants. So it's not that cut and dry.
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You would not believe how quickly sun burn happens in the summer where I live.
A friend of mine went to Antarctica in 2003-04 (I think) and said they had to put on a really thick layer of sunblock anytime they went outside or they would burn in minutes.
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I'm not clear on where Diesel was banned, but do you seriously believe that Asbestos should not have been banned in the applications it was banned in? There are certain occupations where, if you worked it, you pretty much got mesothelioma from the asbestos. I'm not sure how anyone could think that's a good tradeoff.
Re:This is at least part of it (Score:5, Interesting)
China was my guess when reading TFS, too. Seems like anytime something gets banned as bad for the environment, China just looks the other way. Thing is though, the old CFC refrigerants were great in every aspect unrelated to chewing up the ozone. They weren't toxic, weren't flammable, were miscible with mineral oil (and a well-lubed compressor is a happy compressor), and ran at much safer operating pressures than some of today's refrigerants. In fact, until the environmental consequences were discovered, they were considered one of the greatest advancements in mechanical refrigeration.
I could have sworn I read last year that after we pinpointed the CFC emissions to China's industrial region the government did a quiet crackdown and those emissions mostly stopped again.
There's a temptation to view China as a lawless industrial hellscape but that's not true. The Chinese government is very cognizant of the country's image, and only tolerates bending the rules up to a point. Especially around the environment, given the domestic sensitivity surrounding the terrible air quality and water pollution. They very much understand that they need to maintain an appearance of "moving in the right direction" or they risk domestic grumbling and foreign tariffs.
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Yeah, China shut down the rogue factories relatively quickly when the news about them first came out. The MIT article is 2019, this dw one is from 2021:
https://www.dw.com/en/ozone-la... [dw.com]
the vice article (and more so some further explanation down on this page) explains that these CFCs are just leakage and byproducts from the production of non-CFC replacement refrigerants. And these CFCs aren't really that potent at killing ozone anyway. Yeah, they should be cleaned up, but the lede / narrative of
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There's a temptation to view China as a lawless industrial hellscape but that's not true.
Yes, a temptation fueled by their constant need to act like a lawless industrial hellscape at every turn.
If you think China does half of the things it says it will to stop pollution or any other societal ill, I have some charming seaside property in Nebraska you might be interested in.
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until the environmental consequences were discovered, they were considered one of the greatest advancements in mechanical refrigeration.
The same guy that invented CFC's for AC usage, Thomas Midgley, Jr., also invented lead additives for petrol - what an achiever!
I have seen terrible abuse of CFCs in the middle east - where I saw AC technicians using a bottle of R22 refrigerant to blow out blocked condensate lines to clear them of whatever had crawled in and died in there causing them to get blocked. Apparently this was pretty common practice.
When I asked them why they were using the refrigerant instead of a compressor or a bottle of nitrog
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How old are those guys?
Mostly they are pretty fucking old.
You know how the rest of it works out.
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This is untrue. China has been trying to rid itself of CFCs, with some success: https://www.climatechangenews.... [climatechangenews.com]
The problem is that China is big, and tracking down CFC emissions is difficult. China has been attacking the supply chain, but like everything that is banned an illicit supply chain appears to replace the old one.
Research like this should help them deal with this problem.
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They weren't toxic, weren't flammable,
Kind of a yes and no on that one. Does turning deadly poisonous on exposure _to_ fire count?
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Yes.
And the slashdot summary is confusing : "Chemicals that were banned after they punched a hole in Earth's ozone layer are still building up at an alarming rate in our atmosphere, according to research published today in the journal Nature Geoscience". While global CFC-11 levels have been dropping at a constant rate since around 1995 - https://gml.noaa.gov/hats/comb... [noaa.gov]
And on other chemical like HFCs it says : "Scientists were surprised to find that concentrations of several types of those chemicals have c
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I am shocked that a slashdot summary might possibly be confusing or self contradictory.
Old equipment... (Score:1)
It's all the old R-12 and R-22 equipment that's now coming off-line. You think the refer' folks want to take the time to properly drain, reclaim, and evacuate a system during replacement? That takes time and costs them $$ to have to dispose of the spent refrigerant. Screw it.. cut the lines, pull the equipment, sell it for scrap, install new.
I was watching a YouTube video of someone scrapping a lory in S. Korea - no draining anything - remove the frame bolts, lift the truck up and shake it until the engi
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Also mountains of old refrigerators and air conditioners deteriorating in landfills.
Re:Old equipment... (Score:4, Informative)
Except, of course, the equipment that used R-12 and R-22 is mostly gone already in the developed countries, and the leftover machines that still have some in them are getting rare. Nowhere near enough "careless scrap" left to make a difference. In the US and some other nations, R-134a has been the major viable option for replacing R-12 for quite a while now. R-22 is still used in developing nations, though.
As the MIT study pointed out, some of those old banned refrigerants (R-11) are still being made in China, "off the books." Other reports show that India has been making some old CFC versions, too.
Of course, the other (positive) thing that isn't mentioned in the story is that we've been seeing marked improvements in the ozone layer, which shows the original claims were a bit overblown. You see, those refrigerants are very long-lived in the atmosphere, and the 1980s predictions claimed that we wouldn't see _any_ improvements in the ozone layer until at least 2050, and probably closer to 2100. That was all predicated on "shutting down the old refrigerants completely with zero new production." Which (as we now know) didn't happen.
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You can always speculate. If you're going to take actions, though, it's best if they are based on decent evidence. (It probably wasn't elves shooting at the moon that caused it.)
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Why do you hate elves?
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I know right? Those pointy eared little fellas probably could have put a hole in the ozone if they wanted to!
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Fair enough but the only action I'm suggesting is to follow the scientific method.
In this case we observed a hole, formed a hypothesis of refrigerants being to blame and experimented in the real world. The refrigerant levels actually rose but the hole disappeared. The result of the experiment contradicts the core of the hypothesis.
Either we need to replace or revise the hypothesis because the current data better supports the notion that the refrigerants closed the hole than the other way around. Personally
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Of course, the other (positive) thing that isn't mentioned in the story is that we've been seeing marked improvements in the ozone layer, which shows the original claims were a bit overblown.
Why whenever humanity manages successfully to do something as a group to stave off disaster people say the claims were overblown in the first place? They weren't and a fuckton of effort went into making it happen.
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I'm sure there are many countries where they have no such laws, and even if they do, probably no enforcement.
I'm all for protecting the atmosphere, but somehow the rules and regulations aren't being implemented well. It's difficult and usually very costly to properly dispose of any system with refrigerant (air conditioners, refrigerators / freezers, dehumidifiers, air dryers...) Difficult and very costly is not the way to encourage people to do the right thing, as you allude to.
Case in point: I'm in the U
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You're completely correct in that the refrigerant is reusable. Every shop has a refrigerant identifier that will tell them if it's pure enough to save. In no case does anyone ever actually charge $1,000 to recover an AC system, which is a trivial act (I've done it, easy peasy, you literally follow the instructions on the machine) so they were just telling you to fuck off in mechanic.
R134a is cheap enough to where it's not really worth identifying and recovering yours. If it were R12, they might have done. I
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lol I bet whoever modded me troll doesn't have an ASE A7
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Yeah, I speak mechanic! I didn't bother asking any other shops. Like I wrote, if the EPA is serious and genuine, they'd make a system where shops were required to accept your CFC/HFC. Putting all these rules and restrictions simply engender things like "oops, how'd that R22 get out of that system like that?" They need to encourage recovery, not make it difficult. Am I making sense?
I fixed said system years ago, btw. I do have a pretty good leak detector. It ended up being the evaporator, which I was
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In doing some research, I learned of a ton of refrigerants I've never heard of,
Then you may enjoy these links I came across while looking for info on what will replace R134a:
https://www.techtownforum.com/... [techtownforum.com]
https://www.vehicleservicepros... [vehicleservicepros.com]
I can go online right now (Score:2)
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and order just about anything I want shipped from China or Mexico.
You must have some better Google-fu than me, because I can't find anyone selling R-12 anymore. Even eBay seems to have stopped allowing NOS sales of the stuff, which used to be the go-to place for it if you wanted to spend an arm and a leg.
These days it would be really surprising to still have a working older vehicle that uses anything other than R-134a. IIRC, your car was the last model year it was still legal to sell a vehicle with R-12, so any vehicle still using it would be 29 years or older at this p
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Hecho en Chine (Score:2)
Hard to imagine such a swell bunch doing something irresponsible, but here we are. R-12 forever!
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https://www.linde-gas.com/en/i... [linde-gas.com]
The GWP of CFCs and HCFCs is categorically thousands to over ten thousand times that of CO2. Just about the only thing worse is sulfur hexafluoride. The release of ten thousand tons of R-12 is equivalent to the release of a hundred million tons of carbon dioxide. And unlike carbo
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It's not that the words are poison, it's that they are always attached to demands that we give things up in order to stop climate change, even though it won't make a damn bit of difference since we aren't the problem. China isn't giving up shit. For every ton of CO2 we stop releasing, they'll release another 10. For every American who can't get a plasti
Don't worry (Score:2)
They'll make a hole in the atmosphere and leak out.
Fine print (Score:5, Informative)
Scientists were surprised to find that concentrations of several types of those chemicals have climbed since then, reaching a record high in 2020.
Journalists...
Apparently it's too scary to name CFC-13, CFC-112a, CFC-113a, CFC-114a, and CFC-115 as the five chemicals being analyzed.
Buried in the fine print is an easy explanation for three of them: "CFC-113a, CFC-114a and CFC-115 are known by-products of HFC-125 production, and CFC-113a and CFC-114a are a feedstock and intermediate, respectively, in one of the production pathways to HFC-134a." HFC-134a is one of the approved replacements, so global industrial production of it has skyrocketed. It doesn't take much leakage from that vastly increased production to account for the increase in the concentrations of the feedstocks and intermediates. This is further supported by the disparity in concentrations. CFC-112a is found in by far the lowest concentrations, at 0.078 parts per trillion. By contrast, CFC-113a is found at 1.02 parts per trillion, more than 13 times higher. CFC-114a is right in line at 1.13 parts per trillion. Those numbers are from 2020, the last year for which they're available. There was a major ramp up in CFC-113a which started in, you guessed it, 2010, the year the Montreal Protocol specified for final phaseout of the CFCs controlled by the treaty.
The authors stop short of explicitly claiming that increased production of HFC-134a is a major cause of the increases but they did mention the context themselves, so it's obvious they consider it a reasonable conclusion, if not one directly supported by the cited evidence.
Basically the production processes of modern refrigerants are detectably leaky. Rather absurdly leaky, at 2.5 million kilograms per year for CFC-113a and 600,000 kilograms per year for CFC-114a. (Projected from the measured atmospheric concentrations, not measured at the sites.)
Re:Fine print (Score:4, Informative)
One complication: Production of HFC-134a and HFC-125 are also scheduled to be phased out, due to high Global Warming Potentials, starting in the near future. How the US and China schedules for that will line up remains to be seen.
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So what are my inhalers going to get in them after R-134a? The spritzy ones are worthless
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Good question! I have to specifically request Ventolin brand (which the insurance doesnt like, and costs at least $50 per inhaler because of that), because they still use the older R-134a propellant. The new alcohol-based propellant inhalers simply DO NOT WORK for me. The first time I tried one I nearly panicked because it wasn't helping with my asthma attack.
The important bits (Score:2)
The short version: The amount of CFC emissions per year has roughly tripled, but it's not expected to have a significant impact. For perspective, the annual emissions they report represent less than half of one percent of the amount of CFCs we were manufacturing every year back at the peak in 1987.
Long version:
The real cuplrit (Score:2)
The stuff gets banned in the US and the EU but everywhere else in the world they keep using it and venting the excess into the atmosphere. Meanwhile the ozone hole changes size without human intervention.
Not new news (Score:2)
You can enact all the restrictions and bans you want, and they'll never work as long as some fuckwit Poohbear dictator doesn't abide by them.
US will ban (Score:2)
First California, and then the US, will ban all refrigerators and air conditioners in order to stop the leakage of CFCs in China.
but the ozone.... (Score:2)
so the ozone hole is better, but these emissions are at record levels. To my feeble mind that implies these chemicals weren't the issue. So what is the next step to making these gains stick?