Tip of South America more
exposed than ever
The 100,000-plus people
living in extreme southern Chile and Argentina,
Tierra del Fuego and the Falkland Islands became
more exposed than ever to the annual ozone hole
over the Antarctic in September when the hole
changed shape, becoming elliptical rather than
circular, and thus stretching further north than
ever before.
Falkland Islanders and British
servicemen stationed there were told to wear wide-
brimmed hats and long-sleeved clothes and apply
strong suncream to exposed
skin.
SOURCES INCLUDE: Independent
6 October
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CFC smuggling a growing
problem
The illegal trade in
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) - now banned in the
industrialized countries under the Montreal
Protocol -is worth around US$300 million a year, is
spreading fast and is difficult to detect, a
seminar on environmental crime has been told [see
also EDs 95/4, 95/9, 96/4].
Duncan Brack of the
Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in
London told the seminar that CFC smugglers use
sophisticated techniques to outwit customs
officials, including hiding CFC cylinders in larger
cylinders of a legal gas, adding nitrogen to CFC
cylinders to raise the pressure and thus make it
appear as another substance, and pumping water into
virgin CFCs to make it indistinguishable from
(legal) recycled CFCs.
Russia is the main
source of CFCs, and the smuggling racket is
masterminded by the Russian mafia, according to
Brack. At the moment the annual trade amounts to
around 30,000 tons, equivalent to a tenth of the
legal trade in 1993 and enough to delay the healing
of the ozone layer by several years. Thus far the
United States has been the only country to take any
significant action to stop the trade [see ED 95/1].
Since the crackdown, CFC prices have risen tenfold
in the United States. Many European countries have
been much slower to act, Brack pointed out.
The
illegal CFC trade is now global, he continued.
Europe and Australia are major destinations. The
problem of dealing with it is complicated by the
fact that many CFCs are still
legal.
SOURCES INCLUDE: New
Scientist 26 October; Financial Times 17
October
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