It’s almost 100 years since Thomas Midgley Jr. first synthesised chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). It was 1928 and he was working for General Motors, looking for a safe refrigerant to avoid using flammable or toxic alternatives. General Motors and Dupont soon began producing ‘Freon’ chemicals, which quickly dominated the market for refrigerants and also found wide use […]
Sunday (26 June) is World Refrigeration Day and the theme this year is ‘Cooling Matters’ – so why does cooling matter?
Today is World Ozone Day and, like many of our colleagues around the world, we are taking this opportunity to celebrate the success of the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer and its protocol, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer
I’m in Kiev, where an international meeting is looking into the threat posed by the growing criminal trade in climate-wrecking refrigerant gases
It’s hot outside and getting hotter with climate change, so what to do about it?
“Climate change” just doesn’t cut it any more. It doesn’t even come close to defining the precipice on which all life on the planet is currently teetering. Back in the day, when the concept of climate change first grazed the public consciousness, it was more likely to be looked on as something that would be […]