Repeating Grenfell All Over China: Why the BBC is missing the point about Chinese CFC11 production.

NB: this image shows the Grenfell Tower as it was, burning in effective isolation by the standards of modern Chinese cities, where such towers are built in dense packs. See below.

 

This is a link to a BBC article about continuing illegal production of CFC11 refrigerant and "foam blowing" gas in China and the implications of this for the infamous hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. For anyone concerned about this issue, and really everybody should be, this is quite worrying enough. But there's another problem inherent to article, which no-one at the BBC seems able to see:

The usage of the CFC11s, illegally produced and used on a huge scale in China, as the report uncovers, is pretty well entirely to "blow" (that is, expand into a foam) polyurethane plastic used as insulation. Investigations after the Grenfell fire in London and the two fires at the "Torch" building in Dubai, have identified insulating cladding and internal panels incorporating plastic foam as just about the worst fire risk possible, and of all the plastics to use, polyurethane is the worst of the worst, because not only does it burn vigorously and persistently, the choking black smoke that it evolves when burning contains significant amounts of hydrogen cyanide gas, which, when inhaled, stops a person's blood from transporting oxygen around the body, which is a very efficient way of causing death.

The implication of so much CFC11s being used by the Chinese construction industry that the natural healing of the ozone hole has all but stopped, despite a worldwide ban on CFCs, is that nearly every residential property built in China's enormous residential property boom, incorporates highly flammable and grossly toxic CFC11-blown polyurethane foam. Grenfell-like tower blocks are being built, not by ones or twos, or even by the dozen, but with literally scores of identical towers being built next to each other in high-density developments, duplicated on hundreds of sites across the country. The risk is not just of a fire spreading rapidly up and down a tower block, but of it spreading from tower to tower across a forest of densely-packed towers in a metropolitan area.

The last time any Western City matched the level of fire-risk inherent in this, was when practically the whole of London was burnt to the ground in September 1666. The saving grace in China is, bizarrely, that hardly any of the millions of homes represented by these tower blocks and other mass-built buildings, appear to be currently occupied. But that being so, there are so many foam-insulated buildings being built, stacked up next to each other, that there's a real possibility of a multi-building conflagration big enough to produce sufficient toxic smoke to poison the whole of one of the megacities which China's Communist Government wants to build, with up to a hundred million citizens in each. 

This isn't going to be like the existing Chinese pollution problems, where everybody coughs a lot and has to wear filter masks. There will be copious cyanide in the smoke and people will die together in extreme numbers. Outside the megacity, the effect of such a fire would be like a nuclear winter without the nuclear war. The massive use of polyurethane foam in China is not just a Western Liberal environmental worry about the ozone layer: it's potentially very much worse than that.