Word: freon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Those were the first heady days, when the learning curve was steep and the flexibility almost unlimited. They switched from ammonia to the refrigerant Freon as the separating agent without filing a single proposal, cost analysis or environmental-impact statement, without any of the constraints big corporations face daily. If something worked, they used it; if it didn't, they tried something else...
...then there was the Freon. About the time the Beverly plant was begun in 1979, scientists were speculating that chlorofluorocarbons were a significant depletor of the earth's ozone layer. In earlier, smaller facilities, Otisca had been able to recover all but 0.1% of the Freon, motivated to do so by the sheer economics of recycling the expensive chemical. But in the big plant in Beverly, it was losing as much as 5%. Smith discovered that he had installed the wrong kind of compressor to recover the Freon, then argued with AEP over how to fix it. "I tried...
...planet of the millions of tons of ozone-depleting chemicals contained in that vision is not just a big job; it may be the biggest job the nations of the world have ever taken on. In the 60 years since Du Pont began marketing the miracle refrigerant it called Freon, chlorofluorocarbons have worked their way deep into the machinery of what much of the world thinks of as modern life -- air-conditioned homes and offices, climate-controlled shopping malls, refrigerated grocery stores, squeaky-clean computer chips. Extricating the planet from the chemical burden of that high-tech life-style...
Scott felt like a misfit at age 11, when his mother's remarriage took him from a lower-middle-class area to a wealthy suburb. Miserable, he began to drink and take drugs, buying $5 hits of the coolant Freon from a warehouse worker in the morning and then loading up on marijuana at his school during lunchtime. "It was like I was actually killing myself indirectly," says Scott, 18, who with treatment has been sober for three years...