I ran a facility for a company that was a wholesaler/reclaimer of CFCs (reclaiming is just pulling gas out of cooling systems that are being disassembled or rep

I ran a facility for a company that was a wholesaler/reclaimer of CFCs (reclaiming is just pulling gas out of cooling systems that are being disassembled or repaired). We'd buy tanks of dirty refrigerant from HVAC companies, clean it up and resell it. At the time R-12 was the big money, R22 was cheap as dirt but starting to phase out. The company fell apart/was bought out, but not before the firing (and arrest?) of one VP, multiple allegations of trade violations, and the seizing of a substantial amount of refrigerant. Our distribution center was packed up and shipped back to TX, and I never really followed along with what ended up happening. This was about 15 years ago, my memory is a little fuzzy. BUT, a few things have stuck with me... We used to get containers of 30lb cylinders of banned refrigerants (mostly R12, but also R22 and less common CFCs) from China. The BOL and packages themselves stated it was reclaimed refrigerant, which was legal to buy/sell. No idea of it was legal to import/export, but purchasing was done at corporate headquarters and not something I was ever involved with. Anyway, part of my job was overseeing the testing/categorization of reclaimed CFCs. We had a pretty decent little lab we'd use to determine which CFCs were reclaimed, purity, oil content, water content... etc. Part of our company's pitch was that we could make reclaimed refrigerants identical to newly synthesized product ('revirginate') using some advanced distillation and filtration processes. While possible, at the time there was nobody doing true 100% purification of reclaimed products at scale. It was simply too expensive. ALL of the 'revirginated' CFCs had detectable levels of impurities, and we'd frequently do tests with our fancy gas chromatography system for QC. It was close enough that functionality was fine and it was cheaper than virgin gas, so buyers didn't care. But the reclaimed gas that came from China -- guess what impurities/contaminants we found in the Chinese cylinders? Yup... nothing. Remember, this is late 90s/early 00s, and our company was (supposedly) an industry leader using some pretty sophisticated purification techniques. I never bought into the idea that the Chinese product was reclaimed. I could be wrong, perhaps they had better technology, but the reclamation dates were VERY clearly after production was supposed to have ended and I find it hard to imagine they were returning product that was indiscernible from virgin product. I'd be surprised if some enterprising companies in China aren't still making huge amounts of the stuff. It can't all be coming from old systems (it's worth so much money reclaimed) and asthma inhalers.