Development & Aid, Environment, Tierramerica

Mexico Speeds Up CFC Elimination

MEXICO CITY, Sep 3 2005 (IPS) - The Mexican company Quimobásicos stopped producing CFCs, thus reducing output of this ozone-depleting gas worldwide by 12 percent.

Global production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), gases that destroy the Earth's stratospheric ozone layer, was reduced 12 percent on Aug. 25, when Mexico decided to quit producing them.

Following a process of coordination between the Mexican government and the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol, the Mexican company Quimobásicos abandoned its role as the leading producer of CFCs in Latin America and the Caribbean — more than 9,000 tons a year.

As a result, CFC production in Mexico fell to zero, Latin American production 60 percent, and global output by 12 to 13 percent, Agustín Sánchez, coordinator of the Vicente Fox government's ozone protection unit, told Tierramérica.

The move is in keeping with the commitments Mexico made under the Montreal Protocol, a 1987 treaty that obligates the participating countries to eliminate, in various stages, the manufacture and use of ozone-depleting substances.

Mexico, like the rest of the developing world, is obligated to eliminate consumption and production of CFCs by 2010. In the industrialized countries, production and use of these gases was ended in 1996.

CFCs are utilized in refrigeration and air conditioning systems, and are the leading culprits in the destruction of the ozone layer, which protects life on the planet from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.

There are other substances, like halons (used for extinguishing fires) and methyl bromide (an agro-chemical) that cause the same destruction of ozone molecules, and they are also subject to international commitments towards elimination, between 2010 and 2015.

With the help of the Multilateral Fund of the Montreal Protocol, which earmarked more than 76 million dollars between 1997 and 2004 for Mexico to promote industrial conversion to ozone-friendly alternatives, the country is now “the most advanced in the developing world in meeting the goal of eliminating CFCs,” said Sánchez.

In national industrial production, the use of these substances has been practically erased and all that is left is for older refrigerating systems to be converted or replaced.

Quimobásicos, a firm based in the northern city of Monterrey, will maintain 3,000 tons of CFCs on reserve to supply the old equipment that still need them to run, but in two or three years that supply will run out.

Sergio Lozano, the company's director general, told Tierramérica that Quimobásicos received around 30 million dollars from the Multilateral Fund for the conversion and for substitution of CFCs with alternative refrigerants.

“CFCs do not have a commercial future, which is why the conversion had to happen in any case, and what better than the fact that we have done it now, and not in 2010,” said the business executive.

Argentina and Venezuela are the only countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that continue to manufacture CFCs, and they may continue until 2007, but much smaller volumes than Quimobásicos produced.

With sales in Mexico of 1,400 tons of CFCs in 2003 and exports to Latin America and Asia of 7,000 tons that year, the company was one of the world's leading producers.

On Sep. 9, the Fox government and the Quimobásicos executives will hold a ceremony at the factory to make a formal declaration that Mexico no longer produces CFCs.

“Mexico's commitments to the protection of the ozone layer are clear, and Quimobásicos has assumed those commitments as its own,” said Lozano.

The European Space Agency reported Aug. 30 that the so-called hole in the stratosphere's ozone layer (really a thinning that occurs each year over the poles), already measures 10 million square km over Antarctica, an area similar to the size of continental Europe.

Released into the atmosphere, gases like CFCs are carried by masses of air to the stratosphere, located at an altitude of between 15 and 50 km, where the protective layer is found. There, a chemical reaction occurs that breaks up the three-oxygen ozone molecules.

The air currents tend to transport the CFCs primarily to the Earth's polar regions.

According to Mexican scientist Mario Molina, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the impact of CFCs, it will be 20 years or more before we would be able to see a sustained recovery of the ozone layer.

Molina believes the recovery process will continue irreversibly, thanks to the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty that serves as an example of what is possible in global environmental protection.