They were being used in a lot of manufacturing applications. The advantage of CFCs was that they were very stable on the ground. But the problem was that when they would go into the atmosphere and collide with the radiation of the sun, they would release chlorine into our atmosphere. And after the release of chlorine gas, a dangerous reaction would take place.
This chlorine gas reacted with the ozone molecules and formed oxygen and chlorine monoxide. And as we told you in Chapman’s cycle, a cyclic reaction was already taking place. So, the individual atoms of oxygen were already present in the atmosphere. And this chlorine monoxide would react with the oxygen atom and would form oxygen and chlorine. Do you understand the effect of these two reactions?
Chlorine reacts with ozone and after the second reaction, chlorine is released again along with oxygen. That means the chlorine that is released again can react with the remaining ozone again which will deplete the ozone and produce more chlorine. This became a dangerous loop. One chlorine atom could break apart thousands of ozone molecules.
Later, some scientists experimented to find out the truth of this scientific paper. And they found it to be true. Each chlorine atom present in these CFCs was causing a devastating effect on the ozone layer. But scientists still estimated that if things continued like this, then due to CFCs, 2-4% of the ozone layer would be destroyed by the year 2099. This was the theoretical prediction of the scientists. So, people didn’t worry much.
