EPA to Require Recyling of Car Air Conditioner CFCs : Environment: The chemicals are blamed for depletion of Earth’s protective ozone layer. Workers and equipment will be certified.

The Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday that it will issue regulations soon requiring the recycling of ozone-depleting chemicals from automotive air conditioners.

The country’s largest user of chlorofluorocarbons, the motor vehicle air-conditioning repair industry already has launched its own voluntary recycling programs, but the new EPA rules will require compliance of all except small service stations by next January.

Shops that service fewer than 100 motor vehicle air conditioners per year will have until January, 1993, to comply.

EPA also will require certification of service station workers and equipment used in repairing air-conditioning systems, the agency said.

Linked to the destruction of the ozone layer of the Earth’s stratosphere, chlorofluorocarbons--commonly called CFCs--are to be phased out of production by the year 2000 under an international agreement among industrial nations. But the Clean Air Act adopted by Congress last year mandates several steps in addition to the phase-out, including the recycling of the coolants from mobile and stationary air-conditioning systems.

Within the next two weeks, the agency is expected to publish its rules to implement the phase-out over the rest of the decade. Later this year, it will propose recycling regulations for stationary air-conditioning systems similar to the motor vehicle regulations that are expected to be formally published next week.

Since the international move to restrict CFCs, an estimated 100,000 recycling machines, costing $2,500 to $7,000, have been sold to service stations across the United States. EPA officials said they anticipate no significant economic impact from the requirement to recycle CFCs from automotive air conditioners, but the agency said technician certification will cost about $15 million.

EPA Administrator William K. Reilly said the recycling program will complement the phase-out of CFC production “by reducing emissions and easing the transition to ozone-safe substitutes.”

When scientists discovered an “ozone hole” in 1985, it was thought to be an Antarctic phenomenon, but analyses of satellite data have since shown thinning effects in the latitudes of North America and Europe.

Earlier this year, the EPA said increased exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation as a result of the ozone depletion could produce a doubling of skin cancer deaths in the United States.

International protocols adopted at Montreal in 1988 called for the production of chlorofluorocarbons to be cut to 50% of 1986 levels. But with accumulation of new evidence of ozone depletion, the target was changed to a total phase-out by the end of the century.

The protocol is due to be reviewed again next year, and environmentalists have called for still more stringent measures.