Introduction

The following article is reprinted, with permission, from a book called Radar, Hula Hoops and Playful Pigs by Dr. Joe Schwarcz. It is a great little book about chemistry and how it affects our modern lives. It debunks several myths about the products we use, a good read. It is available from Amazon Radar, Hula Hoops, and Playful Pigs for $13.56.

Enjoy!

Don Sleeth

The Rise and Fall of a Gas

Midgley was actually being honored for his discovery of the antiknock properties of tetraethyl lead in gasoline, but his pet project at that point was the replacement of problematic ammonia and sulfur dioxide in refrigerators. The inventor was having trouble convincing manufacturers of the safety of Freon and hoped that his demonstration at the highly publicized awards dinner would help muster support. The ploy worked, and soon refrigerators and air conditioners were humming away, loaded with Freon instead of toxic ammonia and sulfer dioxide. Consumers no longer had to worry about pipes corroding and dangerous gases escaping. Refrigerator sale went up and food poisoning went down; everything seemed right with the world.

But then the sky started to fall - or, at least, it opened up and allowed damaging ultraviolet light to pass through. By the 1970s, concerns were being raised that the chlorofluorocarbons - or CFCs, as they had come to be known - were not so benign after all. Escaping from spray cans, refrigerators, and air conditioners, they went to work destroying the ozone layer that protects us from excess ultraviolet light. Soon, Freon-propelled spray cans were banned, and plans were drawn up for the eventual phase-out of all CFCs: the hero was turning into the villain.

Thomas Midgley did not live long enough to witness the fallout from his invention - a shame, for his brilliant mind would have geared up to seek a solution. The noted chemist fell victim to polio and was confined to bed. Still mentally alert, he devised a pulley system to get out of bed, but one day he accidentally got entangled in the ropes and strangled himself. In my opinion, science lost a champion that day, but not everyone would agree with me. A few years ago, I had the dubious pleasure of attending a supposedly educational play sponsored by La Ligue des Femmes du Quebec, which portrayed Midgley as a fiend who got just punishment for a lifetime of polluting. Filled with memorable lines - like, "Thomas is dead and buried. He has stopped polluting" - the skit ended with the admonition that we must guard against being as stupid as Thomas Midgley. It seems the educators responsible for this presentation need some educating.

In the context of the 1930s, Midgley's contributions were spectacular. No one could have predicted that 50 years later those trailblazing CFCs would blaze a hole through the ozone layer. At the time, lack of refrigeration and consequent food poisoning was a major problem. Midgley's contributions to the science of refrigeration undoubtedly saved many lives. His portrayal as an uncaring rogue just demonstrates the ignorance of all those involved in this absurd, anti-science play.

There are, in fact, real scoundrels in the CFC saga. The controls on the production and use of CFCs imposed by the Montreal Protocol of 1987 have given rise to a profitable new business: the large-scale smuggling of chlorofluorocarbons. These substances are in demand because the legal alternatives that have been developed, the so-called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), require extensive modification of existing refrigerators and air conditioners. It costs anywhere from three hundred to eight hundred dollars to refit a car's air conditioning system to accommodate the more environmentally friendly HFCs.

Malfunctioning air conditioners often lose Freon, and it is obviously far cheaper to repair faulty systems and refill them with Freon than to modify them for HFC use. Currently, recycled Freon can still be used in North America, and so can CFCs that have been stockpiled. Further manufacture of these chemicals is illegal, so supplies are dwindling quickly. Consequently, there is great motivation for unethical businesses to search for illegal suppliers. These are not hard to find: the Montreal Protocol allows for certain non-industrialized countries to keep manufacturing Freon until 2010; a quick Internet search reveals several Chinese companies willing to ship Freon, complete with false "recycled" certificates; Mexico also produces Freon legally for roughly two dollars a pound; in the United States a pound can fetch 10 times that amount, making smuggling from Mexico very lucrative. It is not surprising that Freon ranks second only to cocaine as an illegal import.

Most Freon smuggling is the work of the Russian Mafia. Although, as an industrialized country, Russia was supposed to have phased out the manufacture of CFCs by 1996, it still has at least seven factories producing the chemical in defiance of international law. Russian spray cans still have Freon as a propellant, and there has been no significant move to introduce replacement refrigerants. These days, the Russians have bigger problems to deal with than the deteriorating ozone layer.

The Russian Mafia has recognized the economic potential of diverting Freon to the West, and it has been smuggling some thirty thousand tons every year into Western Europe and North America. Sometimes the containers they use are mislabeled as legal cooling agents; sometimes the CFCs are hidden in cylinders inside larger cylinders of a legal gas. Detecting the contraband is not an easy task. Usually, inspectors just check container pressure - a cylinder of Freon would have a different pressure from that of one of the legal refrigerant gases. But many of the smugglers are chemically astute, and they have figured out that they can add inert nitrogen gas to Freon, thereby raising the pressure to match that of a legal substance. In an effort to keep one step ahead of the Mafia, American inspectors have been armed with devices that attach to a cylinder's vent and can identify the cylinder's contents by measuring the extent to which the gas it contains absorbs specific wavelengths of infrared light.

The World Bank has also called on Western countries to reduce smuggling and help heal the ozone hole by donating forty to fifty million dollars to help Russian Freon factories switch to alternate products. So far, only about thirteen million has been pledged, probably to the relief of the Russian Mafia. Maybe one of the reasons the funds are not forthcoming is that some politicians realize ozone holes may be easier to deal with than bullet holes.

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