Chloroflourocarbon Phase Out

This thread has been born 10 years plus too late, the horse has not only bolted out of the barn, but the horse has sired children who have reached maturity!


In the early 80's sceintests were ringing alarm bells, global weather patterns were changing, the 80's witnessed drought conditions , particularly in Africa. Global Warming was becoming an issue. Deforestation of the Amazon was blamed to an extent, emission of greenhouse gases was another.

Ozone levels were decreasing and a hole was "discovered" at the poles, this it was claimed was getting bigger.

If memory serves me correct, Chlorine, a component of refrigerants used in refrigeration was blamed as a cause of the destruction of Ozone. Scare stories about the ice caps at the poles melting and cities being subdued by floods added to public concerns. The increase in the incidence of skin cancers was another fear being bandied by the media.

Concerns about the environmental, backed by sceintific proof culminated in the Montreal Protocol, where it was agreed that refrigerants would be phased out and replaced with alternatives.

The rest is history.......

Were the scientests correct? Has the decrease in ozone stabalised, is the size of hole getting larger? I dont know, is the simple answer.

The million dollar question is.........were they right to have banned the old refrigerants?

Hello All,
The Montreal protocol, Does anyone else out there think it was dreamt up by loads of beauracrats who have never seen the working of a refrigeration unit.

It's all too easy to say it's the gases fault (Which don't get me wrong didn't help) but i think the bigger problem back in the eighties was the untrained cowboys who just blew gas without a care it the world. These day's engineers SHOULD be qualified & standards have improved greatly. I would think if the gas suppliers checked they would find that the average usage per unit will have dropped.

With regards to the old refrigerents R12 What a gas. You could put it in anything & it would work. Is there really the need for all these gases these days.


Regards

Raymond

Hi Raymond

I smirk at all the politics surrounding the so called Montreal Protocol and the Kyoto Protocol. The easiest route was to blame the refrigeration industry for the reported holes in the ozone layer seen by the space shuttle. Nature will carry on it's changes no matter what mankind does - look back in history a few thousand years and we were just coming out of the "ice age" and now it seems we are entering the "heat age" (just wish some of it would pass over the UK before I pop my clogs!! :D ))

If the reduction of the discharge of refrigerants into the atmosphere leads to a more stable atmosphere and a prolonged life for us all then that is all good - but what about the industries still discharging ozone depleting gasses and green house gasses? We are directly related to one of the major contributors - the brewing industry! :eek: . How much CO2 is used and released every time a pint is pulled? What about soft drinks or carbonated water? Not to mention the amount of chlorine that is used in all the swimming pools in the world?

Why did they just decide to pick on us? Maybe it's because of all the revenue they can get from all the equipment changes and higher priced refrigerants. I may be sceptical and then again I may be right. :)

hello everybody.

this is very sirious subject and have to be treated this way.

first I would suggest that you all take some time to read: www.john-daly.com you can get there many facts.

when the issue came out the first time, I was concerned. I could not bear the idea that I do something that will eventually will hurt other people. then the doubts started to creep in.

all of a sudden the refrigerants make so much damage?
or maybe the reasons are different?

not much was available at the time but some papers published by american scientists .

I did not see, hear or read anything against the idea.

all the compressors manufacturers came out very fast with new compressors new oil was available and ofcourse new refrigerants, not one but about a zillion of them.

one thing hit me, most of them was based on R134a.

I could not find any where clear details of this new substance, who invented it so quick and why I've never heard nothing about other refrigerants which was not good enough and didnt "make it"

it hit me when someone here on this forum wrote that R134a was invented in the 60's and was dagerous to humans.
is it safe now? who knows. frankly I would be more careful now.

companies like danfoss, sporlan and other giants seemed to be ready for that obstical, were they?

1+1+1+1+1= 4. that what I was tought in school and I just did that.

in my oun very private opinion, I am a 100% sure now that what we have witnessed was the biggest con of the last century!

it involves scientists, refrigerant manufacturers, compressors manufacturers, TEV manufacturers, oil manufacturers and so on,

I do not exclude, thinking that also politicians are involved.

no one knows how many trillions of $$ changed hands dissapeared in private bank accounts.

and who pays for all of that? some all of us through our taxes, but most of it was payed by customers especialy the big one who did not want to be left behind and invested millions in being "green".

and whats now? prices are soaring and hardly any one is after one of the best proffesion.

the lack of language is making it hard for me to express every thing I want to share with you.

thanks aiyub for starting it.

chemi

Politics "IS" embroiled in environmental aspects. The US, the largest global economy, and by far the largest contributor to global warming , refuses to sign the Kyoto Agreement, because of the detrimental effect on its industries.

Todays Sunday Times has an article about GW. Ill look into the article again and input what I read.

Moral of the story is, whenever their is legislation, you can bet a " lobby" has been at work. Lobbyist are inward thinkers, protecting their own self interests, not the worlds, or peoples, or the environment........only looking after number 1, themselves.

Industries will pay off whoever, politicians especially as they count as legislators.

Look how the tobacco lobby, despite years of protestation backed by scientific proof, managed to get away with sponsorship, advertising, etc

Its nice to think that we live in a sensible world where decisions are reached after much soul searching, compromise and whats in the best interests....

No, decisions are reached dependant on whos got most clout, most money, whos got who in their pockets.....

Pity us poor fridge folk........whilst we were out blowing out condensers and changing filter driers.......our futures were being mapped out in Montreal!!

Albert Henne synthesized R-134a in 1936. He was an associate of Thomas Midgley, who is credited for first synthesizing CFCs while working for General Motor in 1928. Their work led to R-12 being made commercially available in 1931.

The science that shows how CFCs and Halons destroy the ozone layer is so sound that I don't know how any rational person can dispute it. However, I can see no reason why with the new regulations we couldn't still use R12 as long as we limit its release.

The problem was that CFCs were thought to be harmless and were used in obscene quantities. The same thing happened with DDT. This miracle chemical allowed the US to rid itself of malaria, but was also treated as being harmless and used excessively. If it had been treated with care, it would now be available to battle West Nile virus. However, so damaging were the results of its overuse, it would be politically impossible to use it again in the US, although it is probably the only thing that would work.

It is unfortunate that US capitalism, Soviet communism and even the Greens are incapable of moderation and either overuse or ban useful chemicals.

Posted this on a similar thread here a couple years ago:

Actually, sports fans, letting go of CFCs hurt other industries more than ours. Profit-wise, anyway.

Yes, it's true that we were used to the stuff and ya gotta love a refrigerant with no glide! That is what I miss most: being able to set a pressure control and monitor a system's performance with greater precision. That, and no recovery!

But take it from an old ammonia fan, CFCs are not that user-friendly: denser than oil hence no more pumped overfeed or flooded evaporators with simple floats but a pesky expansion valve and superheat considerations instead. NH3 is thermodynamically superior, simpler for leak detection, inexpensive, and if it does leak, it's fertilizer, for god's sake! Less obvious advantages: clears out your sinuses quick and it makes it easy to drive annoying people out of the mechanical room!

Sure, it killed a few people now and then, but that just served to raise the average intelligence of service personnel! Ah, for the good old days!

I picture the meetings as the captains of our industry: equipment manufacturing, chemical, service, etc. met to plan their strategy to defeat this insidious move to ban CFCs that threatened our livelihood. I'm sure they debated long and hard on whether the ban should be opposed outright or whether we should seek greater evidence of environmental damage before committing to action.

And I'm sure those leaders decided they needed to assess the monetary damage if the ban were to proceed. They summoned their accountants, financial advisors and other soothsayers and ordered them to calculate the huge expenses in converting.

And the figures were large and disturbing. And then the leaders bellowed: "The bottom line, dammit! What's the bottom line?" And in boardrooms across the lands, nervous accountants, hurriedly skipping to the last page of the report, meekly replied: "Umm, we'll make 14 gazillion dollars and 39 cents."

And then I'm sure a great hush descended on those same boardrooms as those great men realized they must respond to the call of duty and vow to protect the planet at all costs!

Other industries were caught napping, I suppose, and paid dearly. I read one report that said a single IBM circuit board manufacturing plant in San Jose, California, using a CFC as a residue-free solvent to wash the flux from etched circuit boards vented 3 million pounds per year!

But if the ozone layer of the planet might be at stake, and the research seemed to indicate it was, merely vowing to recover would mean little. How many pounds of refrigerant do you recover compared to the number of pounds a year you purchase to replenish systems after repairs?

Perhaps we were sold a bill of goods and the threat is bogus. But we're a clever bunch and I'm sure other refrigerants, even other means will be found. (Probably Peltier/photovoltaic when, as Buckminster Fuller envisioned, every house on the planet is roofed in photovoltaics and power is shunted from the sunny side of the planet to the shady side and all the old refrigeration engineers sit around in front of their incredulous great-grandchildren who are sure the doddering old coot has lost it as he tries to explain how these black lumpy compressor thingies used to make cold air!)

Anyway, I'm proud of the industry for doing the careful thing, whether it was for altruistic reasons or not. I hear it's a lot easier to fix a planet before it's broken, than after.

Rog

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Originally posted by Prof Sporlan
Albert Henne synthesized R-134a in 1936. He was an associate of Thomas Midgley, who is credited for first synthesizing CFCs while working for General Motor in 1928. Their work led to R-12 being made commercially available in 1931.

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Ahhh! a great man. Was it not Midgely who also synthesised the lead additive in petrol? That's another of the great man's boons to humankinkind done for in the interests of keeping this planet habitable.

We can't uninvent things we don't like any more, neither can we expect our level of civilisation to regress or give up the benefits we all expect of a civilised standard of living.

But we can avoid dumping all this c-r-a-p in the air and the oceans through irresponsible use and that, I believe, was the original purpose of the Vienna Convention, the ill-fated Rio accord and the start of this thread.


Whether we avoid it, as the Norwegians have done by punitive non refunbdable taxes on HFCs, or by plain old fashioned good house-keeping remains to be seen.
________
iolite reviews

[QUOTE]Originally posted by baker
[B]The science that shows how CFCs and Halons destroy the ozone layer is so sound that I don't know how any rational person can dispute it.

Did I "hear" about a dispute from any member on the scientific findings??? But who says science is the gospel anyway, says I, rather irrationally.......

What was said was that commercial decisions have a role, and "had" a role in whatever took place, ie: the eagerness with which manufacturers embodied new designs and put to market

Yes.......I do dispute that whatever happened was knee jerk, was unjust to one "particular" industry, it chose not to offer solutions by way of imposing controls, education and so forth.

The cfc debacle.....there were many culprits.......as someone pointed out, sportsman and their deodarants, pcb manufacturers, all the other industries who used CFC's as a cleaner and blasted tonnes into the atmosphere.

What they could have said.........as you rightly pointed out......is impose curbs on its use, license operators, forbid emission into atmosphere. Tighter controls on leaks, recycle and dispose of correctly, That was the right route to take.

Somewhere.........I read this was a conspiracy..........Now I am rolling on the floor laughing my .............off

Quote:

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Ahhh! a great man. Was it not Midgely who also synthesised the lead additive in petrol?

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Yep, tetraethyl lead belongs to Midgley.

Keep in mind though that he was attempting to solve a problem with his work on CFCs, i.e., preventing deaths due to leaks in sulphur dioxide and ammonia refrigeration systems in use at that time. He solved one problem, and created another. Such is the way of scientific research at times... :(

hello Prof,

funny you mention all those dates.

I have looked at a SHARP refrigerator today, bought by a friend,

it explains on the back that R-134a, the refrigerant inside that machine is a NEW SOLUTION for GW.
1936 you wrote?

its amazing how stupid people are.

for surviving perpuses I will stick to good old R-12 and keep my haert rate within the normal.

chemi

R12? where can you get that? isnt it illigal to sell that stuff now?

Fair enough, there has been alot of emphasis within the industry about 'new' refrigerants to slow down the depletion of the ozone layer, but it seems to me that the some people are missing the point. OK the likes of R12 / R22 etc are bad for the environment, but the new gasses, R410a in particular are mainly geared towards improving energy efficiency, (smaller compressors often with inverters) thus requiring less power to run and therefore less coal/oil needs to be burned to create the power to run them.

as a world we a running out of fossil fuels and i think this is just another way for the higher powers to slow down the depletion of fossil fuels so they can milk us poor pesents for every penny! Just my opinion.

Hi Thom101,

You was born 4 days after I got married, therefore you have never sniffed R-12 or 502, What a smell ;) .

Yes you are right, its illigal but its being manufacture today in several countries and the demend is not bad, and so are the prices. And yes, I always have a dumpy of R12 and 502 in my van. It makes sure my family will use butter and not margarine. :rolleyes:

What is the GWP of the van you are driving?? Thats include gas, tires, metal and plastic parts.

Honestly, its an endless discussion. The main point of it is that there are no proof for anything the "green boys" are mumbling about.

Chemi :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by chemi-cool

its illigal but its being manufacture today in several countries and the demend is not bad, and so are the prices.

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The phase-out agreed to by the world body allowed undeveloped nations to continue CFC use for a few years more. Its manufacture is still legal, but sales are only legal in specific countries.

CFC smuggling was a big deal in this country for a while. One company would ship equipment to Mexico for assembly and have them shipped back with huge receivers installed, full of CFC's!

Rog