the.com/freon
The gas that kept you cool while quietly eating the ozone layer.
means A trade name for a family of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerant gases once used widely in air conditioners, fridges, and aerosol sprays.
from Coined in the early 1930s as a trademark by the American chemical company Kinetic Chemicals (a DuPont–General Motors venture) for the CFCs discovered by Thomas Midgley Jr. The name was built to sound clean and scientific — likely shaped by 'fluorine,' one of its key elements, dressed up with a brandable '-eon/-on' ending common to gas names like neon and argon. Decades later research showed these same stable, odorless, 'miracle' gases were drifting into the stratosphere and tearing apart ozone molecules, turning the trademark into a cautionary byword.
- actually a brand
- generic name for chlorofluorocarbons, trademarked by DuPont
- banned culprit
- montreal protocol phased it out starting 1987
- ozone villain
- one chlorine atom destroys thousands of ozone molecules
- replaced by
- hfcs, now blamed for warming instead of holes