U.N. Meeting Vows to Ban Ozone-Killing Chemicals

Delegates from 81 countries closed a U.N. conference Friday with a pledge to end by the year 2000 the production and use of chemicals that are rapidly destroying the Earth’s ozone layer.

The Helsinki delegates, who represented most of the world’s population, also agreed to set up a system to help Third World countries pay to replace equipment or Western-imported consumer products that emit the chemicals. But they left open how much aid will be involved, how the industrial countries will finance it and who will control it.

Scientists at the four-day meeting said ozone is being lost much more quickly than envisioned in 1987, when leading producers of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, agreed in Montreal to cut emissions in half by 1999.

However, Mostafa K. Tolba, director of the U.N. Environment Program, told delegates in Helsinki that the situation represents “an environmental time-bomb.”

CFCs are most commonly used in refrigerators, air conditioners, aerosols and cleaning materials for the metal and electronics industries.

Skin Cancer, Eye Disease

When they rise into the atmosphere, they damage the ozone layer that blocks some of the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Scientists say the extra radiation increases cases of skin cancer and eye disease and damages plants and animals crucial to the natural food chain.

Delegates in Helsinki unanimously adopted their declaration to phase out the production and consumption of CFCs worldwide by the year 2000.

Included in the accord was the United States, the world’s largest producer of CFCs. It makes nearly 40% of the chemicals and consumes about 30%.

The delegates also said they would phase out halons, which are ozone-destroying gases used in sprinkler systems and fire extinguishers. They gave no target date.

Tolba told a news conference Friday that the Helsinki meeting “exceeded all expectations” and succeeded in a “translation of words into actions.”

But the Helsinki Declaration does not become legally binding unless it as adopted as an addendum to the Montreal Protocol. A follow-up meeting is scheduled in London next spring.

The delegates in Helsinki energetically debated proposals to set up the fund to help developing countries conform to treaty requirements.

Industrial countries argued that setting up a bureaucracy to oversee the fund could waste money better spent on aid.

Developing countries said they wanted assurances that the fund would not take money from other aid projects such as housing.

Environmental groups, which were among more than 100 observers at the closed meetings, charged that the declaration was “purposely kept vague on all major points.”

Representatives of Greenpeace said other hazardous chemicals should have been added to five CFCs and three halons to be cut in half under the Montreal pact.

Scientists from industrial countries joined the international environmental group Greenpeace in arguing that carbon tetrachloride and methyl chloroform, which are used in solvents, should be banned. They said the chemicals have a much greater ozone-depleting potential than CFCs.

The two chemicals escaped the original ban because they are short-lived once released into the air. CFCs have an atmospheric life of up to 100 years.