Читать книгу Climate Change For Dummies - Elizabeth May - Страница 62

Some of the sources of these gases are really wild. Here’s one: Nike came out with the popular Nike Air shoe, a running shoe with a cool little air-filled bubble in the heel, in the late 1980s. That bubble was filled with — you guessed it — a GHG (Sulfur hexafluoride, to be exact)!

The amount of GHG in those shoes all together added an equivalent of about 7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — or the emissions from 1 million cars — into the air when they hit the garbage dump after being worn out. In the summer of 2006, after 14 years of research and pressure from environmental groups, Nike stopped using the GHG in shoes and replaced it with nitrogen. We’re glad that bubble burst.

Unfortunately, getting sulfur hexafluoride out of Nike runners didn’t eliminate all sources. Sulfur hexafluoride levels in the atmosphere continue to rise due to its use in the electricity sector. Concentrations of sulfur hexafluoride have been creeping up by about 0.36 parts per trillion (ppt) per year. In 2021, it made up 10.66 ppt of our atmosphere.