Well I'm not a scientist, but here are just some of my observations.
The weather started to get warmer and I new it was going to get hot soon so I thought I'd check to see if my home Air Conditioner was working after sitting all winter. Better to get it charged or serviced before the hot weather hit and everybody else had the same idea.
I turned it on and it worked fine, after sitting for 6 months. That meant that all of the Freon in the system was still in the system and still under pressure. Then I got to thinking, if my Air Conditioner didn’t leak, and most didn’t then how do Chlorofluorocarbons get out into the atmosphere to deplete the Ozone layer that everybody is so worried about.
Being a matter of fact guy, I thought I’d look at it step by step. DuPont or whoever produces the Freon, or whatever they call it now, does it by the ton, probably thousand of tons. Now to the best of my knowledge it is shipped pressurized. Kind of like the propane that you get for your home barbecue. So it seems to me that Dupont would take every effort to see that their tanks, or tank cars don’t leak. Because if they did, when the tanks get to their customers they would be empty, and nobody is going to pay for an empty tank of anything. That would be stupid.
So let’s say DuPont is shipping a tank car to General Motors to put in their cars Air Conditioning systems. DuPont has done a good job of producing and storing the Freon and General Motors offloads it to one of their on site storage facilities awaiting new cars to come off the assembly line and to have their Air Conditioning systems charged and delivered to their customers. Ask yourself if General Motors is going to allow any leaks in the storage system. Probably not because all the Freon would escape and there would be nothing to put into the cars Air Conditioning systems. And that would be stupid, and costly.
Maybe it leaks out after they put it in the cars. Probably not, because when the customer takes his brand new car for a ride they will probably demand that the Air Conditioner work. They probably won’t buy the argument that they leak all the time, that’s what depletes the Ozone layer. No that would be stupid. Nobody would take delivery of any brand new car where the Air Conditioner didn’t work, or only worked for a day or two because all of the Freon leaked out.
Maybe it’s the commercial Air Conditioning systems like the ones installed in office buildings. No, because if all the Freon leaked out of the building’s Air Conditioning system, then you would expect that the Building Management would be all over the Air Conditioning contractor that installed the system because it would become unbearably hot in the building.
Maybe it is the contractors that install the commercial systems. Maybe their tanks leak. No, because if the commercial contractors Freon storage systems leaked, they would not be able to charge the systems installed in the office buildings.
Maybe it’s the homeowner like myself that all the leaks come from. Probably not, since mine didn’t leak and I expect most others didn’t either. A dead giveaway that I had a leak would be that my Air Conditioning system didn’t work. In order to get it to work I would have to call an Air Conditioner Service Company to come out and fix it. No Service Tech in his right mind would attempt to refill a system that has leaked. That would be stupid. They would charge you to find, and fix the leak before they would even consider re-filling the system.
So you have to ask yourself, where do all the Chlorofluorocarbons come from that are depleting the Ozone layer on a Global Scale.
Hmmmm, I wondered that too.
Having said that...
