ENVIRONMENT: AUTOMOBILES

Ottawa searching for home for banned mercury

MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT

ENVIRONMENT REPORTER

May 22, 2007

Former federal environment minister Rona Ambrose went to a Kitchener, Ont., junkyard late last year and announced with great fanfare that the government was ordering steel makers and car companies to remove dangerous mercury from old cars before the vehicles can be recycled.

There is just one hitch. The government hasn't figured out what should be done with the mercury, a potent neurotoxin, once it is collected.

That could be a big headache because companies might end up extracting 10 tonnes of the silvery grey metal from the nine million automobiles believed to contain light switches and other devices using mercury. The program is one of the biggest ever undertaken in Canada to prevent mercury from a consumer product getting into the environment.

In response to questions from The Globe and Mail about what will happen to the mercury from cars, Environment Canada indicated in an e-mailed statement that it hadn't yet determined "the ultimate fate" of the metal and that the issue was clouded because hazardous waste disposal is a joint federal-provincial responsibility.

When asked if the metal might end up being resold on the open market and used in other products, a spokesman for the department, Alex Cavadias, said "that is a possibility."

Proposed guidelines issued by Environment Canada for the auto and steel sectors covering the mercury recovery program for cars didn't specify what should be done with the metal, although the industries have been told that they will have to tell Ottawa what they do with anything they collect.

In its e-mail, Environment Canada said the mercury could be dealt with through a range of options, which "may include long-term retirement or reuse in products for which mercury-free alternatives do not exist."

What to do with the mercury presents a big problem because there is no long-term depository in Canada where the metal can be safely stored in perpetuity.

One use for mercury, where no alternatives exist, is fluorescent bulbs, including the compact fluorescents replacing the incandescent bulbs now being phased out. But recovery of the metal from old lights isn't mandatory in Canada and about 95 per cent of the mercury from this source is released into the environment.

Mercury, a heavy metal that is a liquid at room temperature, is a major health worry because it is a neurotoxin. By interfering with brain development, mercury can cut intelligence levels in children, particularly through exposure during fetal life.

Releases of the pollutant are being washed into waterways, where they're finding their way into fish, making them dangerous to eat. Even minute amounts of mercury, such as a teaspoonful, are enough to make all the fish in a small lake unsafe to eat, according to some estimates.

Because it is an element, mercury can't be destroyed, unlike other pollutants that can usually be processed into less harmful substances.

Mercury is used in many older cars to run switches that operate trunk lights.

There is one pilot project under way to collect the switches, and it highlights the problems of safe mercury disposal.

The Clean Air Foundation has been encouraging scrapyards to extract switches before automobiles are recycled.

To date, this effort has led to the collection of 142,000 switches containing about 120 kilograms of mercury. The foundation, fearful that the metal will end up on the open market and lacking federal regulations on its safe disposal, is having the mercury stored in a large drum at an Ontario fluorescent glass recycling plant.

"We wanted to prevent the mercury from just going back into being used in other products," says Cara Sweeny, mercury program manager for the foundation.