Collins, Allen endorse ban on sale of mercury thermometers

Two members of Maine’s congressional delegation announced Friday that they plan to introduce bills to ban the sale of mercury thermometers and to stop the dumping of the hazardous metal in Third World countries.

Sen. Susan Collins and Rep. Tom Allen are both calling for an end to the use of mercury thermometers nationally. Their measures would provide incentives to people who trade in mercury thermometers for newer ones that do not contain mercury.

Allen also plans to introduce legislation to allow the U.S. Department of Defense to temporarily accept mercury like that left at the HoltraChem Manufacturing Co. plant in Orrington. This would stop the export of waste mercury to Third World countries that have less stringent environmental standards, Allen said Friday.

Environmentalists have long said that the HoltraChem mercury should be taken out of circulation, or retired, rather than reused. In September, Gov. Angus King wrote to Secretary of Defense William Cohen, asking his agency to take the HoltraChem mercury and add it to a 5 million-pound stockpile maintained by the military.

The request was denied because federal law bars the department from accepting mercury it does not own. Allen’s measure would change this law to allow the Defense Department to store waste mercury temporarily while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency develops a permanent plan to recycle and retire it.

“By directing the Defense Department to accept waste mercury on an interim basis, my initiative will provide companies with an environmentally sound alternative to overseas export,” Allen said.

“This is exactly the right policy initiative,” said Michael Belliveau, the toxics project coordinator for the Natural Resources Council of Maine. He said there are another 10 plants like HoltraChem nationally that have on hand a total of between 3.5 million and 5 million pounds of mercury. Many of them are likely to go out of business soon or to stop using mercury, so a place to store the metal permanently is imperative, he said.

While mercury thermometer bans have become popular – Freeport passed one earlier this month – Allen is the first to introduce a plan for handling waste mercury that comes from people trading in old thermometers for new ones that don’t contain mercury.

The EPA estimates that 17 tons of mercury end up in landfills each year from discarded thermometers.

“A mercury fever thermometer contains about a gram of mercury … enough to contaminate all the fish in a lake with a surface area of 20 acres,” Collins said Friday.

Maine Sen. John Martin, D-Eagle Lake, has introduced a bill to ban the sale of mercury thermometers statewide.

The federal Food and Drug Administration has warned pregnant women and young children not to eat too many meals of some ocean fish because they contain high levels of mercury, a neurotoxin that can impair brain development. The Maine Bureau of Health has long advised the same population against eating fish from the state’s rivers and lakes because they contain too much mercury.

Allen’s legislation also calls for the gradual elimination of mercury from other consumer products, including electrical thermostats, fluorescent light bulbs and batteries.

He also will reintroduce legislation that would require oil- and coal-burning power plants to reduce their mercury emissions by 95 percent. Another measure that would close a loophole that allowed older power plants to continue to violate clean air standards will be introduced again by Allen.