The ozone mafia

Arne Jernelov Project Syndicate

Now that the Kyoto Protocol has been ratified, with even Russia belatedly signing on, a threat is emerging against an earlier landmark in international environmental protection -- the Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol for defending the stratospheric ozone layer. The threat comes from an unlikely source: organized crime.

The reason is simple. To protect the stratospheric ozone layer, international agreements have been reached to ban the use and trade of the ozone-destroying chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). In order to replace these chemicals with others that are more benign, the equipment in which they are used-- like freezers, coolers, and units for foam plastic production -- must be substituted for new ones.

But it's much cheaper, although forbidden, to use the old equipment and refill them with CFCs when needed than to buy new machines and use the more environmentally benign but more costly alternatives. As with any ban, a market was thus created-- and with it a business opportunity for well organized and environmentally reckless criminals.

Organized crime is constantly on the lookout for such opportunities, and it continues to find them. So it is no surprise that CFC or freon smuggling has developed without much attention, and risks jeopardizing the Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol.

These agreements are hailed as great successes, and annual reports summarizing official statistics are published showing that the use of CFC continues to decrease. The content of chlorine (from decay of CFCs) in the stratosphere has leveled off, and two years ago the ozone hole over the Antarctic was the smallest in decades (and broken up into two). However, new reports show a thinning of the ozone layer over the Arctic, and last year's Antarctic ozone hole was as large and deep as ever.

There is no way of telling yet whether these represent mere fluctuations in a slow recovery process or a break in the positive trend. Is the volume of illicit CFC trading so large that it is now a factor of real importance? As with illicit drugs, it is difficult to estimate the extent of smuggling operations.

A number of extensive catches have been made by national customs agencies, the largest in Japan, in recent years. In most cases, the forbidden CFCs have been labeled as permitted HFCs (hydrogenfluorocarbons), but labels like 'spray paint' and 'lubricants' also have been used.

Ships and airplanes have been used for transport in this black-market trade. The shipments caught by customs authorities mostly originate from free industrial zones, also called export- processing zones, in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Egypt.

In most parts of the world, customs agencies are not especially focused on CFCs, and the compounds are not easy to distinguish from HFCs without sophisticated analytical equipment. So it is reasonable to assume that the proportion of the total smuggled volume that is discovered is smaller than for narcotic drugs.

Complicated lines of transport using transit countries are often used. One such line, which is presumed to be significant, goes from Europe (Spain) via Singapore or Dubai, through India to Nepal or Bangladesh and back again to the market in India.

Some features in the conventions for protecting the ozone layer constitute holes of a legal kind. One is that industrial and developing countries march at different speeds when it comes to phasing out CFCs. This means that what is banned in one country is permitted elsewhere.

Another problem is that there are no restrictions on the sale of old equipment that runs only on the banned substances. For example, freezers that require CFCs can be freely exported from, say, Sweden, where they can no longer legally be refilled when required, to Egypt, where refilling is allowed. The rapid increase of foam plastic production in export processing zones is thought to be based on their purchase of CFC-dependent production units from OECD countries.

So, do such practices constitute a real threat to the conventions for protecting the stratospheric ozone, or are they "only" a factor that will delay the final phase-out of CFC's within years or a decade? If the latter, that is bad enough, but the answer is not self-evident, and the whole question of organized crime and the illegal trade with CFC's demands attention. Customs officials all over the world and fighters of organized crime have a new battle -- this time for the environment -- on their already busy hands.

The writer is Professor of Environmental Biochemistry, an honorary scholar, and former director of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, and a UN expert on environmental catastrophes.