As late as 1986, the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy (an association representing the CFC industry founded by DuPont) was still arguing that the science was too uncertain to justify any action.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

• DuPont was the inventor of CFCs with a 25% global market share in the 1980’s.

• DuPont announced that it would begin leaving the CFC business on March 24, 1988 after a NASA announcement that CFCs were not only creating a hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, but also thinning the layer elsewhere in the world.

• “DuPont had begun researching substitutes for CFCs in the 1970s when sales began to slump. Because the company moved on alternatives to CFCs before its competitors, any ban on their use would give the company a sharp advantage.”

• – from the book Unsustainable by Patrick Hossay

• In 2003, DuPont was awarded the National Medal of Technology, recognizing the company as the leader in developing CFC replacements.

• Has Dupont’s bottom line been helped or hurt by government regulations that continuously forced it to develop new products (and patents)?

2.9

HCFCs are alternatives to CFCs: they decompose more readily in the troposphere so they will not accumulate to the same extent in the stratosphere.

Alternatives to HCFCs