Deep-Sixing CFCs : As Ban Looms, Companies and Consumers Feel Pinch
As governments around the world intensify their war on chemicals that weaken the Earth’s vital ozone layer, people like Ron Ford are becoming part of the collateral damage.
Ford owns an automotive air-conditioning business in Granada Hills that depends on Freon, an ozone-eroding gas widely used as a refrigerant. With the federal government poised to ban production of Freon next year, the gas’s price has skyrocketed--and that is costing Ford.
“Customers can’t afford it,” he said. “Business is way off. And the average customer gets upset at us first, not the government.”
Ford isn’t alone. Around the nation, the drive to flush Freon and other chlorofluorocarbons out of American cars, homes and factories is forcing costly change on industry and, increasingly, consumers.
With CFC production tumbling and prices soaring, consumers face higher costs to service their cars and home air conditioners. Reports of CFC smuggling have surfaced. And industries are converting to a CFC alternative that--while it does no harm to the ozone layer--is a potent contributor to global warming.
The objects of all this hubbub were once viewed as among the most useful and versatile compounds ever made. CFCs were used in thousands of consumer products and industrial processes, from aerosol sprays to sterilizing agents for medical instruments. They were best known to consumers as coolants in air conditioners and refrigerators.
But scientists concluded that the chemicals were behind an alarming thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer, setting the stage for increases in skin cancer and blindness, crop failures and disruptions of the marine food chain.
More than 130 nations have since signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, which in 1987 set deadlines for stopping production of CFCs and similar chemicals. In the United States, CFC production must stop by Dec. 31, 1995.
As a result, U.S. industry is retooling on a large scale. And there have been striking successes as businesses scramble to rid themselves of CFCs and convert to safer substitutes. Makers of fast-food packaging, for example, now use safer materials. Electronics firms and other high-tech manufacturers eliminated CFC-based solvents.
Rocketdyne, the Canoga Park-based aerospace and defense contractor that formerly used CFCs to wash metal parts, now employs a water-vibration technique used for years in ultrasonic denture cleaners.
Nonetheless, ridding American industry of CFCs remains a monumental task, especially in the air-conditioning and refrigeration sectors. CFCs are still used in more than 140 million vehicle air conditioners, 160 million home refrigerators, 5 million commercial refrigerators and 80,000 air-conditioning systems in skyscrapers and other large buildings.
For owners of that machinery, the impending CFC production ban leaves three costly choices: replace the equipment, retrofit it to run on CFC alternatives or stick with CFCs and face tightening supplies and rising prices. (Although manufacturing CFCs will be outlawed, it will remain legal to use them in air conditioners and other products.)
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has estimated the cost of cleansing the United States of CFCs through 2075 at $45 billion. But that expense will be offset many times, the agency said, by the $32 trillion in savings in the form of reduced rates of skin cancer, crop damage and other problems.
So far, the costs of industrial conversion have been largely absorbed by business. But with the federal ban on retail products such as Freon less than 18 months away, price jumps and the specter of shortages are beginning to hit consumers.
“This is where it’s coming down to the pocketbook,” said Catherine L. Andriadis, a spokeswoman for DuPont Co., one of the world’s largest CFC producers.
Since the Montreal protocol, U.S. production of CFCs has tumbled 62% and Freon prices have zoomed--from less than $1 a pound to $20 or more. And that has fostered the reported smuggling of CFCs into the United States from China, Russia and other countries.
“We don’t have any direct evidence . . . but our sense is that (smuggled and illegally imported CFCs represent) a fairly significant amount that may add up to millions or hundreds of thousands of pounds,” said James Harris, a spokesman for AlliedSignal Inc., another large CFC manufacturer.
Anticipating shortages, many users are stockpiling CFCs. To head off supply problems, the Clinton Administration last year persuaded DuPont, which had planned to halt production at the end of this year, to keep making CFCs through 1995.
U.S. consumers are most likely to feel rising refrigerant prices when they get their car or home air conditioners serviced. While most new cars use a CFC substitute, 90 million autos with CFC-filled air conditioners will remain on American roads after the production ban takes effect, according to the EPA.
Ford, who owns Acme Auto Air Conditioning of the West Inc., said that with recent Freon price increases, he is charging more than $100 to refill older air-conditioning units--a service that not long ago cost $40.
The situation may be even more unsettled among owners of high-rises and other big buildings with air-conditioning systems that often require several thousand pounds of CFCs. So far, owners of only about 25% of the country’s 80,000 large air conditioners have converted or replaced them.
Meanwhile, environmentalists such as the activist group Greenpeace complain that U.S. industry, by switching so quickly to a leading CFC substitute known as HFC-134a, is trading one serious environmental problem for another.
HFC-134a does not erode the ozone layer, and manufacturers of autos and air conditioners have rushed to redesign their systems to accept it. As of the 1994 model year, most new cars use HFC-134a.
But environmentalists say HFC-134a is a potent contributor to the “greenhouse effect,” a gradual increase in Earth’s temperature caused when solar heat is trapped by atmospheric gases.
It’s a debate that will only intensify as the economic disruptions caused by the CFC phaseout spread. Said F. Sherwood Rowland, a UC Irvine chemistry professor who pioneered in CFC research: “People are really in the process of conversion, and conversion is going to cost a lot of money.”
