ENVIRONMENT: Mexico Far Ahead of Target for Elimination of CFCs

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, May 26 1998 (IPS) - Mexico is set to eradicate industrial production and uses of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) way ahead of target.

While according to the 1987 Montreal Protocol developing nations are to suppress the use of CFCs by the year 2010, Mexico is expected to do so by late 1999.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) disbursed 2.7 million dollars to Mexico Tuesday to support that undertaking. With UNDP and state backing as well as private sector investment, Mexico is making steady headway towards the goal of suppressing the use of CFCs in the great majority of industrial goods produced here, according to the National Institute of Ecology.

UNDP representative in Mexico Bruno Guandalini said this country “has done an excellent job in protecting the ozone layer, and is in the vanguard in many aspects.

“Mexico should be proud, because in general terms it is complying very well with its commitment to defend the ozone layer,” he underlined.

The UNDP sees Mexico as one of its top priorities in terms of eliminating CFCs, and is currently participating in projects here to the tune of 30 million dollars. The UN agency is channeling resources earmarked by the Montreal Protocol’s Multilateral Fund.

The 17.2 million dollars that the UNDP has shelled out to Mexico for that purpose in the past four years constitute the proportionally largest sum disbursed by the agency to any Latin American country, and one of its largest consignments worldwide.

The reasons underlying the UNDP’s focus on Mexico are its big industrial export sector – one of the world’s largest – the interest that the business community has demonstrated in protecting the ozone layer, and the government’s commitment to the Montreal Protocol, Guandalini told IPS.

Since 1991, the UNDP has channeled 100 million dollars to 37 countries in order to meet the targets set out by the Protocol, signed in 1987, which aims at eradicating production of CFCs – substances used in refrigerants, solvents and aerosols.

In Montreal, industrialised regions committed themselves to eliminating a majority of uses of CFCs by January 1996, while the target for developing countries is the year 2010.

Thanks to the funds and technical assistance provided by the UNDP, 10 local companies in Mexico have stopped using CFCs and 62 others are about to do so. “The 72 companies which received assistance were the main local industries using CFCs,” said Guandalini.

And Mexico has made such great strides that a full 99 percent of aerosols no longer contain CFCs.

But although Mexico remains one of the leaders in terms of suppressing the use of CFCs, several companies operating here continue to produce the ozone-depleting substances for export or to supply local firms.

“We are not doing anything illegal. We still have the right to produce CFCs, because there is a market for them,” said Jose Angel Anidon, commercial manager of Quimobasicos, one of the Mexican companies working with CFCs.

Over the past few years, U.S. and Canadian environmentalists have discovered tanks of CFCs produced in Mexico that have been smuggled into their countries.

But Guandalini said such problems could be considered relatively insignificant compared to the interest that most of the Mexican business community and the government have expressed with respect to putting an end to the use of ozone-depleting chemicals.

Ozone is a naturally occurring form of oxygen found in the stratosphere – 15 to 50 kilometres above the earth’s surface – which acts as a protective shield to life on earth by absorbing most of the sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation. “Holes” in the ozone layer appear each year over the Arctic and Antarctic, and the layer has become generally thinner due to the effect of ozone- depleting chemicals.

The World Meteorological Organisation says sustained surges in radiation reaching the earth could lead to a rise in cancer in humans and animals and lower crop yields, and damage the food chain, starting with microscopic plankton in the world’s oceans.

A number of studies, including research conducted by prominent Mexican scientist and Nobel Chemistry Prize-winner Mario Molina, demonstrated more than 10 years ago that CFCs destroy the ozone layer, a discovery that led to agreements towards their gradual elimination.