this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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At least the article came with the numbers. Given what I regularly read about all the pollutants we daily pump into the atmosphere, the numbers in this article for the materials being atomized is...well, they're very small in scale.
Basically, if a few hundred tons per year is hurting the ozone (and other things), just imagine what the billions of tons per year of emissions does.
The point here is not that aluminum oxide "pollutes" on its own, it is that it "speeds up" the harmful reaction between ozone and any chlorine (like CFC) "pollutants" up there without being consumed, so it keeps acting over 30 years. It makes all the pollutants you mention "more effective" at depleting ozone.
I didn't see a mention in the paper on what amount the bump up would be with the maximum amount of AlO2 distributed in the layers of the atmosphere where the reactions would occur. When emissions are in the trillions of tons, I wonder if it would even be measurable.
emission of what? There aren't trillions of tons of Chlorine in the stratosphere (that's what interferes with O3) being pumped into the atmosphere. Are you thinking of CO2?
I doubt anybody can give a confident answer today about the value of the effect that a kg of Al2O3 can have per ton of atmosphere at ozone layer height, because that would involve not just doing what they did in the paper, but also figuring out what "shape" the Al2O3 particles have to know what their adsorption surface would be, for e.g. zeolites this can be 16m2 per gram. e.g. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/earth-extraterrestrial-space-dust-weight-meteorite but maybe it can be simply extrapolated from analogous metallic meteorite dust samples :/
Carbon monoxide also contribute to ozone breakdown, and there are additional manmade substances similar to CFCs with chlorine and bromine that are still leaked. Environmental changes in the Antarctic also can increase ozone depletion as well as longer lasting cold air in the stratosphere (observed in 2020 in the Arctic). The mention of emissions was just to suggest that smaller reactions can get lost in all the other problems we have created, although wildfire increases are raising CO.