A watchdog group found a big loophole in a major environmental policy

For more than 35 years, millions of people worldwide have benefited from an international treaty that has phased out gases damaging the ozone layer, a vital atmospheric shield that screens out dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

But despite its effectiveness — it has been called the most successful international environmental treaty ever adopted — the Montreal Protocol has an exemption. This lapse is now allowing U.S. factories to emit gases that both damage the ozone layer and warm the Earth, according to a new report by a watchdog group, the Environmental Investigation Agency.

Using sophisticated infrared technology, the Washington-based nonprofit group was recently able to detect releases of these chemicals — known as fluorinated gases, or F-gases — from two production facilities in Texas and Louisiana. Such inadvertent releases by factories could help account for rising emissions of these pollutants worldwide, the EIA said in findings provided to The Washington Post.

“We’re not saying that all F-gases should disappear tomorrow,” said Avipsa Mahapatra, climate campaign lead at the EIA and an author of the report. “What we’re saying is that F-gases should be limited to essential uses, and the companies that produce them should be able to control unnecessary emissions, which come at a massive cost to our ozone layer and our climate.”

The group’s data shows how two types of F-gases - chlorofluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons - are entering the atmosphere. Since 2010, the Montreal Protocol has banned the production of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. And since 2019, the Kigali Amendment to the protocol has required countries to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs.

Yet the treaty doesn’t fully eliminate these pollutants - it allows for their continued production, so long as the gases are used as feedstocks to make other chemicals. Fifteen facilities across the country use the gases for this purpose. Some environmentalists see this as a major loophole that should be addressed later this month, when negotiators from nearly 200 countries meet in Nairobi to evaluate implementation and enforcement of the protocol.

The Environmental Investigation Agency focused on a Honeywell International facility in Baton Rouge, and a Chemours facility in Corpus Christi, Tex., in its report. The authors used a special technology - portable infrared spectroscopic gas detection - to capture imagery of plumes of gas, invisible to the naked eye, wafting from both facilities.

At the Honeywell plant, the devices detected emissions of three types of CFCs that are banned globally, except when used to make other chemicals. Honeywell reported emissions of one type of CFC to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2018, but not in 2019 through 2021.

The group also detected emissions of four types of HFCs that Honeywell had not reported to the EPA from 2019 through 2022. Complete EPA emissions data for 2022 and 2023, when the authors took the measurements, is not yet available.

Asked for comment on the findings, Honeywell spokesman Mike Hockey said in an email: “Honeywell complies with and provides air quality reporting as required by the Environmental Protection Agency. We are committed to greenhouse gas reduction and have pledged to become carbon neutral at our facilities and operations.”

Policymakers have struggled to regulate ozone-depleting chemicals because compounds such as CFCs and HFCs have long been key components of modern life. They have important uses in refrigerators, air conditioners, foam packaging and insulation.

Phasing out CFCs produced a double environmental benefit: It scaled back a potent destroyer of the ozone layer while reducing a powerful greenhouse gas with thousands of times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Companies initially introduced HFCs as substitutes for CFCs, but those chemicals also damaged the ozone layer and contributed to global warming, although less so than CFCs.

More recently, industries have substituted hydrofluoroolefins, or HFOs. They have a much smaller climate impact, about 10 times that of carbon dioxide. But they belong to a class of “forever chemicals” that can persist in the environment for years without breaking down.

The EIA detected emissions of HFOs at the Chemours plant, which the company was not required to report to the EPA.

Asked for comment, Chemours spokeswoman Cassie Olszewski said in an email that the report “appears to be an attempt to discredit the importance of hydrofluoroolefin (HFO) solutions in helping advance global climate goals.”

Olszewski said the company “has and continues to implement and advance state-of-the-art technologies to reduce emissions of fluorinated organic chemicals - which includes HFOs.” She also criticized the EIA’s methodology, saying the devices do not appear capable of differentiating between different gases, or between emissions from the Chemours plant and those from nearby facilities.

Mahapatra said she and her colleagues stand by their findings. She said her group used technology with a proven record of identifying different gases, and took steps to ensure the emissions came from the Chemours plant by taking measurements directly downwind of it.

Stephen Yurek, chief executive of the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, a trade association, said the industry has made significant strides toward phasing out ozone-depleting and planet-warming chemicals. He said the Montreal Protocol’s exemption has allowed the industry to continue making essential everyday products, including the commercial refrigerators in grocery stores across the country.

“It’s part of necessary life,” Yurek said. “It’s part of the cold chain. And actually, there’s more emissions from food waste and rotting than there is from the refrigerants used to service the cold chain.”

The EIA report builds on more than a dozen scientific studies on unexplained F-gas releases around the world totaling roughly 870 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. That figure is equal to the annual emissions of more than 200 coal-fired power plants, or of Germany.

Masoud Ghandehari, a professor of urban systems engineering at New York University who helped review the new findings, said they shed light on a little-known environmental hazard.

“These loopholes have been here for decades,” he said. “EIA is actually coming out and bringing it to the forefront of people’s attention.”

This is not the first time researchers have encountered unexpected CFC emissions. In 2018, scientists reported a surprising spike in CFCs that they traced back to factories in Xingfu, an industrial boomtown in rural China. The scientists alleged that the factories had ignored the global ban and continued to produce CFCs, mostly to make foam insulation for refrigerators and buildings.

This time, however, the evidence implicates the United States, not China. It comes after the U.S. Senate last year voted to ratify the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which calls for the global phaseout of HFCs, making America the 137th country to approve the treaty. In 2020, Congress also passed a bipartisan bill that directed the EPA to slash the nationwide use and production of HFCs by 85 percent over the next 15 years.

In response, the EPA on Friday announced a rule restricting the use of HFCs in new refrigeration systems and other products when alternatives are available. The agency also proposed a second standard aimed at preventing HFC leaks from existing equipment.

During a news conference last month, Sens. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) and John Neely Kennedy (R-La.), who co-sponsored the 2020 bill, hailed America’s progress toward phasing out the climate superpollutants and replacing them with safer alternatives.

“We’re phasing down by 85 percent the HFCs that are causing such havoc in our atmosphere,” said Carper, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “So there’s a big payoff, and it’s a payoff we’re beginning to inherit already.”

Alex Hillbrand, technical director for industry and emerging technologies at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said there is no doubt the Montreal Protocol has been a huge success. The pact is expected to spur the full recovery of the ozone layer by 2040 - a rare environmental success story in the era of climate change.

But it also has some shortcomings.

“It’s been the single largest intervention humanity has ever taken for climate change,” Hillbrand said. “We’ve avoided millions of cases of skin cancer by protecting the ozone layer. But at the same time, there’s always work to be done to stay on top of all of these gases.”

At the negotiations in Nairobi, which are scheduled for Oct. 23 through Oct. 27, Hillbrand said he expects officials to begin reevaluating the protocol’s exemption for feedstocks, a topic that made it onto the official agenda.

“It’s a potential next frontier for the protocol,” he said.