Mercury is harming birds at high elevations - Probably us too!

[Tom Rankin]

NYTs article about Mercury impacting the environment. It starts by discussing what happens to birds, etc., but then it says:

"Methylmercury, the most toxic form of the heavy metal, was found to be widespread ... in forests, on mountaintops [ ] and in bogs and marshes that are home to birds long thought to be at minimal risk."

Makes you wonder if that mountain spring is really pure!

And then:

"Such consequences mimic the effects of mercury on humans..."

Full Article.

 

[Becca M]

INTERESTING!!! I occasionally drink directly out of streams and eat snow.

Not that I plan to use a filter.... ever.... but, out of curiosity, do they remove mercury?

 

[Snowflea]

Scary.

Coal burning power plants are the #1 source of mercury polution:
http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/mercury/sources.asp

 

[paul ron]

BTW which brings us to going back to using mercury in manufacturing, particularly light bulbs... CFLs. How will we dispose of em, any better than we did with mercury products in the past?

makes you wonder.

 

[DougPaul]

INTERESTING!!! I occasionally drink directly out of streams and eat snow.

Not that I plan to use a filter.... ever.... but, out of curiosity, do they remove mercury?

The standard filters will probably not help. Don't know about filters containing activated charcoal.

I believe that ingesting mercury from food is more of a risk than from drinking water. It is a good idea to avoid certain species of fish and fish from certain waters. See http://water.epa.gov/scitech/swguidance/fishshellfish/outreach/advice_index.cfm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_in_fish, and http://extoxnet.orst.edu/faqs/foodcon/mercury.htm

Doug

 

[DougPaul]

BTW which brings us to going back to using mercury in manufacturing, particularly light bulbs... CFLs. How will we dispose of em, any better than we did with mercury products in the past?

makes you wonder.

There has been mercury in fluorescent lamps for many years. CFLs only contain a small amount. (Incandescent lamps and LEDs do not contain mercury.)

Hardware stores that sell them will often take them back for recycling.

Doug

 

[MichaelJ]

Fluorescent lights, tubes or compact, should be recycled or treated as hazardous waste, depending on your city or town. Where I live, I've been required to bring my tubes to the Minuteman Hazardous Waste Facility. I haven't burned out any CFL's yet.

I suspect that the majority of the country is not going to do this. They either don't know or don't care or will refuse to take a day to bring one light bulb to a facility. Particularly apartment complex dwellers, whose trash just ends up in a dumpster unsorted and unviewed, whereas if I put a fluorescent tube out with my barrels it would not be picked up. The CFL's, of course, are worse since they wouldn't even be noticed in a trash bag.

I think CFL's are going to do more harm than good to the environment. Even with Ace, Aubuchon, and Home Depot accepting them for recycling, most people are just not going to set aside a light bulb and remember to bring it back.

I just put Philips LED bulbs in our kitchen. Dimmable (with an appropriate dimmer), soft white light, no flicker, no buzzing, pennies to operate and will last a long time. I hope LED's replace CFL's, at least for residential use.

 

[peakbagger]

One of the standard approaches to removing mercury from power plants is to inject granulated activated carbon into the exhaust gas then removing the activated carbon with a particulate collector. I would expect that a filter using activated carbon will collect mercury until it has lost its effectiveness.

Do note, the voluntary risks that a hiker takes to get to the mountain are several order of magnitudes higher than the risk of individual mercury poisoning. Of greater concern is the bioaccumulation of mercury into the environment whihc impacts society in general over the long term.

If someone wants extensive discussion on the impact of mercury and other Hazardous air Pollutants, the Boiler MACT Major source regulation http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/utility/utilitypg.html

National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants from Coal- and Oil-fired Electric Utility Steam Generating Units and Standards of Performance for Fossil-Fuel-Fired Electric Utility, Industrial-Commercial-Institutional, and Small Industrial- Commercial-Institutional Steam Generating Units

The majority of the 1100 pages is EPA's answers to multiple inquiries about aspect of the regulations and contained in the answers are a whole lot of citations and references to various studies.

New England has switched a lot of the generation to natural gas but in a lot of the country coal is still king and coal plants are the major sources of mercury introduced into the environment.

 

[paul ron]

Fluorescent lights, tubes or compact, should be recycled or treated as hazardous waste, depending on your city or town. Where I live, I've been required to bring my tubes to the Minuteman Hazardous Waste Facility. I haven't burned out any CFL's yet.

I suspect that the majority of the country is not going to do this. They either don't know or don't care or will refuse to take a day to bring one light bulb to a facility. Particularly apartment complex dwellers, whose trash just ends up in a dumpster unsorted and unviewed, whereas if I put a fluorescent tube out with my barrels it would not be picked up. The CFL's, of course, are worse since they wouldn't even be noticed in a trash bag.

I think CFL's are going to do more harm than good to the environment. Even with Ace, Aubuchon, and Home Depot accepting them for recycling, most people are just not going to set aside a light bulb and remember to bring it back.

I just put Philips LED bulbs in our kitchen. Dimmable (with an appropriate dimmer), soft white light, no flicker, no buzzing, pennies to operate and will last a long time. I hope LED's replace CFL's, at least for residential use.

I see LEDs as the best alternative but it erks me to see mercury coming back into production and on such a large scale as well. Almost every household today has CFLs and as mentioned, many people will just toss em into the day trash.

Florescents have been recycled for several years n not as common in homes. Where I worked (hospital) it is a big deal to dispose em as hazardous waste in special barrels, not break em as we once did in dumpsters years ago.

.

 

[Billy]

Anyone else read the title of this thread and think Tom was referring to the planet?

Anyone? Anyone? Beuler?

Of course, now I have Marvin Gaye on the brain.

 

[Raven]

There's a bit of a misconception about the mercury in CFLs.

They do have some mercury, but as pointed out in a few posts here, the number one source of mercury contamination in the world are coal-fired power plants which generate electricity. The more electric used from these sources, the more mercury enters the environment.

Since incandescents use about 4.5 times the electricity of CFLs, as it turns out, based on the 5-6 year life of a CFL and the energy use differences, even if no CFLs are recyled, there would still be more mercury released using the equivalent in incandescent lights.

I have the comparison numbers on a file on another computer if anyone is interested. Maybe I will post that here on a later edit.

LED technology will probably overtake CFLs very quickly IMO and then the mercury question will only be a matter of which source of energy is being used for power (coal, gas, solar, etc.).

Incidentally, a couple of years ago, China was building two coal-fired plants per week.