Recharge, recycle to reduce mercury pollution

Do you want to help reduce mercury pollution? Here are some things you can do:

• Buy rechargeable batteries, and when they're worn out, take them to a store that recycles them. Forty-six Maine stores, including Radio Shacks, Wal-Marts and some hardware stores, offer battery recycling services.
• Recycle so-called ''button'' batteries used in cameras, watches and other small devices by taking them back to a store that sells them.
• When buying other batteries, look for a small green tree printed on the label. That tree indicates that no mercury has been added by the manufacturer.
• Businesses should contact the Maine Department of Environmental Protection for a list of companies that pick up spent fluorescent lamps. These worn-out lamps are a hazardous waste under federal law and must be recycled.

However, even if consumers get involved in a big way - something most experts hope happens - the impact they can have on mercury pollution overall would be fairly small.

Together, battery and lamp companies use 30 tons of mercury a year to make their products, according to government and industry estimates.

Even if every bit of that mercury escaped into the air, it would still account for only 12 percent of total United States mercury releases annually.

''These programs are just a good short-term solution,'' said Barbara Parker, the DEP hazardous waste specialist.

The long-term solutions: Taking steps across the country and around the world to impose costly environmental controls on coal-burning power plants, trash incinerators and industries that are major, man-made mercury sources.

Cheap and plentiful

And lamp and battery manufacturers like using mercury because it's cheap, plentiful and it conducts electricity with great efficiency.

The problem is that when fluorescent lamps and batteries are thrown away, the toxic metal can escape into the environment, helping to cause the pollution that poisons fish, loons and other wildlife and threatens human health, too.

In Maine, where the majority of the trash that people produce is burned, batteries and fluorescent lamps account for at least 30 percent of the mercury that flows into the air from trash incinerators, according to the DEP.

Fluorescent lamps, surprisingly to many consumers, are defined as a hazardous waste by federal law. Businesses, schools and other institutions are supposed to recycle them.

Several companies collect spent lamps from businesses in Maine and ship them to licensed recycling centers outside the state.

Conservation Lighting, a Portland firm, charges 12 cents a foot to dispose of fluorescent tubes, but finds that few businesses buy the service.

At right: Fluorescent bulbs, some of them broken, await processing at Global Recycling. The company handles bulbs shipped from Maine.

Indeed, when the DEP began looking into lamp disposal last year, it found that many businesses were unaware of the law regulating spent lamps.

Maine Medical Center, for example, a major consumer of fluorescent lamps at its sprawling complex in Portland, just started looking for a contractor to take away its lamps, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Even the state of Maine, until recently, had been throwing away lamps from state office buildings, said Parker, the DEP hazardous waste specialist.

Since so many businesses don't realize that fluorescent lamps are a hazardous waste, the DEP has been working on a public-education program with chambers of commerce, other groups and individual businesses.

For now, the department has no plans to fine companies that don't comply.

Unfortunately, homeowners who use fluorescent lamps will have trouble recycling them. Local recycling centers do not accept fluorescent lamps because it's too hard to store them without breaking them.

And if a lamp is broken, the mercury vapor inside escapes.

Shouldering the cost

Consumers would pay a deposit and receive a storage container when they buy a fluorescent lamp. They could get their deposit back when they returned the lamp in its container to a store or redemption center.

''There'll be a lot of resistance to that,'' Root said. ''But that may be the only way to do it.''

Even though they contain mercury and release it to the air if broken, fluorescent lamps still make environmental sense as a consumer product.

They are three to four times more efficient than incandescent light bulbs, so much less electricity is needed to operate them. That translates into less air pollution from power plants.

And power plants - especially coal-fired ones - are a major source of mercury pollution. They release 51 tons of mercury into the air in this country every year, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Trash incinerators put even more mercury into the air, as much as 65 tons, by the EPA's estimate.

Recycling fluorescent lamps and batteries could lower that number, but the impact on total mercury emissions - estimated at 245 tons a year in the United States - would be small.

Root, the recycling director at RWS, questions whether individual consumers can or should be expected to carry the burden of solving the mercury problem.

The best way to tackle mercury may be to ban its use, he said.

Now, manufacturers who use mercury are passing pollution costs on to the public - in the form of recycling expenses for the programs that do exist, and in terms of higher trash-disposal fees to pay for mercury pollution controls on incinerators.

''It seems to me,'' Root said, ''that there's something fundamentally wrong about that.''