Mercury bill will burden crematories

Stephen Burrill, the superintendent of Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor, got a surprising call Monday about a new development being proposed in Augusta for his busy cremation business.

The lobbyist for the Maine Cemetery Association told Burrill that a late-filed bill in the Legislature would require, by the fall of 2006, that crematory operators remove from the dead all dental fillings containing mercury before the bodies can be burned, and then properly dispose of the material.

Either that, according to the bill submitted by Sen. Scott Cowger, D-Hallowell, or Maine’s five crematory operators would be forced to install scrubbers on their stacks to keep any of the mercury from escaping into the atmosphere.

After learning what those stack scrubbers would cost, Burrill decided that this was one of the most ill-conceived, if well-meaning, pieces of legislation he had ever come across.

“I’ve been here for 35 years and this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard of,” said Burrill, who is the third generation of his family to run the pastoral, private garden cemetery, the second oldest of its kind in the country. “What are they thinking down there in Augusta?”

For one thing, he said, the notion that crematory operators should be required to add dental extractions to their job descriptions is preposterous. Cemeterians, as they’re known, have absolutely nothing to do with preparing bodies for cremations, he said. They don’t open the containers or wooden caskets that hold the bodies to be cremated, and they never even meet the families of the deceased.

“The preparation of a body for cremation is the funeral director’s function,” he said. “So the burden would have to be put on them.”

And what an uncomfortable burden that would be, he suggested, should funeral directors become responsible for telling grieving families that their loved ones’ filled teeth, or at least the amalgams in them, would have to come out before they could be cremated. Who would actually do the extractions, he asked, and how would the material be disposed?

“I think the families would be mortified to hear that kind of talk when they’re already at such a low point,” Burrill said. “Wouldn’t you be?”

He said the only option allowed by the bill, as proposed, would be to install stack scrubbers. At $200,000 each, which is the estimate he got Wednesday, Burrill believes the prohibitively expensive proposition might force some of Maine’s cemeteries to shut down their crematory operations. At Mount Hope alone, which operates four of the state’s 15 incinerators, called retorts, the scrubbers and the cost of retrofitting the crematory building would easily approach $1 million.

Because Mount Hope has been chartered since 1858 as a nonprofit organization, Burrill wonders whether the state would help pay for the expensive scrubbers or merely enact the law as an unfunded mandate.

Burrill also questions the Hallowell legislator’s recent statement that Maine’s crematories release at least 20 pounds of mercury, “and probably more than double that,” into the atmosphere each year. Based on a 1999 Environmental Protection Agency study of crematory emissions, which concluded that the average mercury emission amounted to .23 grams per hour of operation, Burrill calculates that 1.25 pounds of mercury are emitted from his four-retort crematory in a year.

“And that’s only true if every cremation contains mercury,” he said, “and we don’t know that.”

Burrill said the costs of the proposal would ultimately be borne by the people of Maine, where cremation has become the preferred form of bodily disposition in half of the state’s average of 11,000 to 12,000 deaths a year. Mount Hope does more than 1,800 cremations annually, nearly twice the rate it did in 1992.

“It’s become increasingly popular as a more economical form of burial in Maine,” said Burrill, who charges $275 for the service. “This bill would make that less so. We would probably have to more than double the charge. So the bottom line is the consumer would be the one hurt. I just feel the state has more important business to deal with than this foolish bill.”