Hydrofluorocarbons are ubiquitous; the chemical industry created these fluorinated hydrocarbons in part because ofhteir properties, one of which is a nearly total resistance to breakdown.

As with any industrial chemical, its fate was to be ejected into the environment. The Environmental Protection Agency was only created in 1970. Prior to that, there was widespread dumping of nearly everything that came out of the consumer and industrial waste streams.

Companies would back up their trucks to any river, and open a valve and just dump whatever they wanted. If they were polite about it they *might* dig a pit. If they were super polite about it, they might have lined the pit with plastic.

Of course, none of this was effective, and in a few short decades of industrial production, more than half of all waterways in the US was tainted with cancerous chemicals. Widespread ecological collapse, preceding today's largely marginal and highly monitored collapse, occurred.

This was the decades during which global ecodiversity plunged from 80% to 20%. Today, we rise up and clap like seals when we spend enormous amounts of money to just to clean up a tiny amount, having spent a fortune and millions of man hours proving that stuff was going on.

HFCs are in all of our bodies; it is at every altitude, from sea level to mountaintops, the arctic circle to the equator. HFCs were used in one-time disposable "products" such as fast food wrappers, but also in many consumer products and industrial hardware.

Many products in homes are constantly shedding HFCs, and this is proven by "body burden" studies which found, among other things, HFCs in pregnant mothers and especially small children. Carpet manufacturers coated their polyethylene fiber with HFCs to make it easier to clean, as it would repel liquids. Babies and small children had the highest body burden as the concentration of small inhaled particles can be up to 1000% higher when you are breathing air close to the ground.