Up in the Air

By Bill Polits

This thumbnail sketch of the history of the role of fire suppression agents and the environment will go a long way to orienting you toward the impact of current national and international regulations.

The 1930's saw a rise in activity to develop CFCs and other haloalkanes for use in refrigeration and fire suppression. By the late 1960's halon began to be used widely in fire suppression applications of many kinds and CFC-based refrigerants were being very widely used.

In the 1970's, climate scientists began to notice that the level of stratospheric ozone in the atmosphere - a critical shield protecting the surface of the earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun - was dipping dangerously low. They found that man-made chemicals, collectively known as Ozone Depleting Substances (ODS), were contributing to the loss of the ozone layer.

Concern raised by the scientific community translated into international regulations via the Vienna Conference of 1985, which resulted in the Montreal Protocol. Ratified in 1989, this treaty required a reduction in the amount of ODS (including halon) over time, and resulted in the ceasing of all halon production in industrialized countries by 1994. With respect to the stratospheric ozone layer, the Montreal Protocol has been declared a success as the rate of ozone depletion has slowed dramatically, and is expected to return to normal levels sometime in the next 50 years.

In the meantime, however, climate scientists have identified yet another man-made threat to the environment - global warming. Human activity, principally the burning of fossil fuels but also the production and accidental release of chemicals including hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are heating up the atmosphere, and, if predictions hold true, will have devastating effects on the ecosystem unless dramatic reductions take place.

HFCs were developed as replacements for the refrigeration and fire suppressant chemicals that science had found to be corrosive to stratospheric ozone. The irony is that some of these "ozone friendly" replacements have global warming potential (GWP) ratings thousands of times higher than that of carbon dioxide, and in some cases much higher than Halon 1211 and 1301. It is here that the current battle lines are being drawn with respect to fire suppression and environmental regulations.

There are three current fronts with respect to regulations of HFCs: 1) Climate and Energy legislation currently under consideration in the United States Congress; 2) the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's (UNFCCC) Copenhagen Conference, December 7 - 18, 2009, which is essentially a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, with the goal to develop international agreement about greenhouse gas emissions, and 3) current efforts by the United States, Canada, Mexico and other countries to regulate HFCs under the Montreal Protocol, thereby shifting the focus of that agreement to the job of regulating greenhouse gases.