Just when we thought we’d solved the ozone hole, scientists are here to curb our enthusiasm for humanity’s ability to reverse anthropogenic damage. Atmospheric chemists policing the earth’s atmosphere have found a troubling reversal in recent data, stating that CFCs or ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons have sudden risen in the last 13 years, looking at data from 2010 to 2020. 

The Montreal Protocol banned most uses of chlorofluorocarbons and called for their global phase-out by 2010, and we thought it was a great success story: Earth’s ozone layer is projected to recover by the 2060s.

With results are published in Nature Geoscience: “This shouldn’t be happening,” says Martin Vollmer, an atmospheric chemist at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in Dübendorf who helped to analyse data from an international network of CFC monitors. “We expect the opposite trend, we expect them to slowly go down.”

The researchers believe that factories are accidentally releasing three of the ozone-depleting chemicals — CFC-113a, CFC-114a and CFC-115 — while producing replacements for CFCs. At the time when CFCs were phased out, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) were brought in instead. But CFCs can be produced as by-products in the manufacturing stages of HFC. “Accidental” production is discouraged by the Montreal Protocol, but not prohibited by it. Look to Excavation, a new Apple TV series, to understand how we should not be letting mineral-grabbing business people to lead our future.

“A lot of this probably boils down to the factory level,” Vollmer says, pointing out that HFC production is on the rise. “A factory can be run relatively clean or relatively dirty.”

The researchers speculate that levels of CFC-112a might be on the rise because of its use as a solvent or as a chemical feedstock. However, they say they need to discuss this idea further with chemical engineers to confirm that assessment.

A research project for engineering students to take on?

Meanwhile, banned CFCs can be traced to China, where it is used mostly for home insulation. A Nature study estimated that somewhere between 90,000 and 725,000 tonnes of CFC-11 were produced and embedded in products like foams and gases between the years of 2013 and 2019, and these CFCs have not yet been emitted yet into the atmosphere. This foam is in buildings across China and the rest of the world where the home insulation material is not banned.

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