In 1938, Roy Plunkett of DuPont was trying to make a new refrigerant when he discovered Teflon.
The helium refrigerant that does this job will run out in a few weeks and when it does, Herschel will go blind.
For the majority of the past years they have served as a refrigerant re-seller, selling R-22 and other refrigerant gases.
Over half of them involve reducing emissions of trifluoromethane, a by-product of refrigerant and Teflon production and an especially nasty greenhouse gas.
That motivates companies to produce as much as possible of the ostensible product--the refrigerant HFC22, a.k.a. freon--to get at the real moneymaker, HFC23.
In fact, Michael Wara of Stanford University calculates that the credits from cleaning up refrigerant production are twice as valuable as the refrigerants themselves.
He was instrumental in getting chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerant production banned because they accelerated the destruction of stratospheric ozone over and near Antarctica in early spring.
Heating and cooling experts say central air-conditioning systems should be serviced annually to remove dirt, change filters and check the level of Freon, a refrigerant.
In the summertime the pumped water starts off warmer than the earth, but the warmth is absorbed by the earth, and the water comes back up at 57 degrees and is used as an air-conditioning refrigerant.
Its refrigerant is R-22, a chlorofluorocarbon that will probably leak out, taking to the sky, with the very slight chance that it will be wafted upward by a thunderstorm so powerful that it penetrates the stratosphere, depositing it where catalyzes the destruction of springtime ozone, especially over Antarctica.
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