Freon

[Bettina]

I tried searching for this here, but couldn't seem to find anything. If there is another link please link me to it.

 

A friend of mine told me that freon is too heavy to travel to the stratosphere and gave me this link. He is convinced that freon is not the problem and we threw away something cheap to buy something more expensive. (gas)

 

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/env99/env256.htm

 

What is the real answer. Does freon get up there in quantitys enough to do damage?

 

Bettina

[silkworm]

CFCs are incredibly stable and they travel. Freon is virtually indestructable in the troposphere and, the best I understand it, drifts to Antartica where it hangs out on clouds of ice until special circumstances allow it to escape to the stratosphere where it is decomposed by uv radiation. It destroys the ozone layer when it decomposes into Cl- radicals, setting off a chain reaction that can destroy several thousand 03 molecules/Cl- radical via these reactions:

 

Step 1:

[math]

\ce{CFCl2 ->[\text{uv}] CF2 + Cl-}

[/math]

 

Step 2:

[math]

\ce{Cl- + O3 -> ClO- + O2}

[/math]

 

Step 3:

[math]

\ce{ClO- + O -> Cl- + O2}

[/math]

 

And the new Cl- radical in the last reaction (step 3) can proceed in a new set of reactions that destroy the ozone layer, so it doesn't take a lot of CFC in the stratosphere to do a lot of damage.

 

It's actually pretty well established that CFCs (Freon) are what destroy the ozone layer. Sorry to your friend.

[tejaswini]

yes it is true that the feron is very heavy to travel upwards that is why it takes around 15 years for it to travel from the ground to the stratosphere where it can stay for a 100 years degrading thousands of ozone atoms .They react with ozone and take away a oxygen moleule leaving the normal oxygen. as silkworm stated

the cfc's are dissociated by uv rays forming a free cl atoms as catalysts. they destory the ozone composition.

 

for more information check wikipedia:ozone depletion.