GETTING BY WITHOUT CFA's

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Taking personal responsibility and action to reduce ozone depletion. By Alex Wilson

MOST OF US ARE MORE THANWilling to make a few changes in lifestyle if it's good for the environment. We're learning to get by without pesticides in the garden. More and more we drive relatively energy-efficient cars. Surveys show that most of us would even be willing to pay a little more on our electric bills if doing so would help reduce acid rain. But wha t about ozone depletion? We've heard a lot about CFCs, or chlo rofluorocarbons, and their destruction of the earth's protective ozone layer. How can we minimize our use of these chemicals?

Chances are you're a pretty big user of CFCs. Eighty percent of cars sold in the U.S. have air conditioners — the largest single source of CFC release into the atmosphere. You almost certainly have a refrigerator in your home, with one type of CFC used as the refrigerant fluid and another in the insulation. If you've done any construction in the last few years, you probably used foam insulation and cans of spray-foam sealant containing CFCs — particularly if you were building an energy-efficient house. CFCs are also used in foam cushions, packaging materials, cleaning fluids for electronic equipment, some aerosol propellants, and many consumer products such as boat horns, tire inflators, and Dust-Off for cleaning camera lenses. This article will review where CFCs are used around the home and business and describe some of the alternatives currently available or under development.

CFC's take years to reach the stratosphere, where they destroy
the UV-shilding ozone layer.

Fig. 1:UV light breaks a chlorine atom off a CFC molecule. The chlorine reacts with ozone (O 3 ), forming molecular oxygen (O 2 ) and chlorine monoxide. The oxygen is pulled off that molecule by a free oxygen atom, leaving the chlorine atom to start the process all over again.

Ozone Depletion

Concerns over ozone have generated quite a bit of confusion in recent years. Ozone is a bad guy at ground level, where high levels present a serious pollution problem in most major cities. But the same compound, a form of oxygen, is a good guy in the upper atmosphere, where it blocks out harmful ultraviolet light. Scientists first theorized 15 years ago that man-made chemicals could break down the protective ozone layer. Their warnings led to a ban of CFC aerosols in this country in 1978. After taking that action, we pretty much forgot about ozone depletion and CFCs for 10 years. All that complacency vanished, however, after scientists discovered a large hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica in 1985.

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