It could be worse. That's not something you hear a lot of environmental scientists say at the moment. But last month a study in Nature showed how much faster the handcart could be speeding towards hell without the Montreal Protocol. Despite its less than thrilling name, the agreement saved our bacon, the study found. We would be facing an even more scorched earth scenario without it.
The Montreal Protocol banned ozone-depleting chemicals, including the most notorious of them, CFCs or chlorofluorocarbons. Thursday, September 16th, was International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer, an annual event marking the massive environmental win back in 1987. We should all have baked cakes and raised a glass to its invisible protecting powers.
The ozone layer protects us from the UV radiation of the sun’s rays. Ultraviolet radiation gives humans skin cancer but it also affects plants’ abilities to soak up carbon dioxide. So less ozone would mean much higher carbon levels. Modelling the scenario with a depleted ozone layer was a dire picture of what the study called a “world avoided”.
Ozone layer
The consumer object most associated with CFCs was the aerosol can. The gas that puts the squirt in cream and the foam in the shave has been replaced by hydrofluorocarbons, which have zero effect on the ozone layer.
But pressurised aerosols still leave a heavy waste residue behind. Tom Murphy calculates that Irish shavers produce 20 million pressurised aerosol cans a year. They cannot be put in recycling bins so most likely end up in landfill or are incinerated with the remaining metals recycled. Murphy's Mayo company produces De Facto shaving oil (defactoshave.com) in Claremorris. It's sold in Ireland and several European countries – and hopefully in the future in the US. Murphy started using an American shaving oil back in the 1990s when he struggled to shave without leaving himself "with more scraps of toilet roll on my face than were left on the roll".
Shaving oil
Full disclosure? I found out about the shaving oil when I was on Conall O’Morain’s podcast That Great Business Show and took home a gift box. Since then the shavers in my house have been using it happily. The best bit? A pocket-sized plastic bottle will last as long as a small pile of discarded shaving gel cans.
We had already abandoned the cans. Before the oil arrived there was a badger brush deployed from the wonderful Bí Urban (biurban.ie) in Stoneybatter. Their shave soap is made with infusions of locally sourced horse tail and rosemary which is definitely preferable to foaming gunk from a single use aerosol can.
Catherine Cleary is co-founder of Pocket Forests
