Now their production is being phased out by international treaties and the safe destruction of existing CFCs not yet released into the environment is a major concern.
Incineration is one of several destruction methods being evaluated.
However, the pyrolysis and oxidation kinetics of these materials at combustion temperatures is not well known. This has potential implications in the incineration of municipal waste for power generation and waste removal. The pyrolysis of CFCs and HCFCs can in princple be sources for radicals for the study of radical-radical reactions. Such pyrolysis combined with laser photolysis of an appropriate photolyte can lead to production of completely different radicals whose recombination, disproportionation, or abstraction can be studied. These reactions typically do not have reaction barriers and involve large amplitude vibrational or hindered rotor motion in the region of the reaction bottleneck.