With bare majority support from the Natural Resources Committee, a bipartisan bill to ensure the safe removal and recycling of mercury from vehicles needs strong support in the House today. The bill, in effect, requires auto makers to take back the toxin mercury they have put in U.S. cars. Similar legislation is pending throughout the Northeast, making the recycling both practical and an effective way to keep this pollutant out of the region’s rivers, air and food chain.

At high doses, mercury can cause tremors, convulsions, kidney failure, deafness, blindness, even death. Exposure is especially serious to developing fetuses and, therefore, to women of childbearing ages. Mercury in the environment is blamed for affecting wildlife including, in Maine, bald eagles. In 1998, Congress determined that mercury was the most dangerous of all air pollutants.

LD 1921, supported 7-6 by the committee, would have auto manufacturers – emphatically not auto dealers – establish centers for mercury collection through waste consolidators that would take switches and a few other car parts containing mercury and send it out of state for recycling. There are approximately 850,000 such switches equaling 1,500 pounds of mercury on the road today. Starting next year, new cars will be mercury-free, so the problem of mercury in vehicles is substantial but of limited duration – the vast majority of cars with mercury will be off the road in the next seven to 10 years.

For nearly a decade European cars have been mercury-free (and U.S. manufacturers sell vehicles there that meet this standard), so the question centers of recycling centers on U.S. car makers, which, not surprisingly, do not like this bill at all and have sought a number of ways of getting out of it, including a major amendment to LD 1921 that shifts the responsibility to anyone but them. Of course, they don’t like it; they would rather have someone else pay the cost of recycling or taxpayers cover the cost of cleaning up sites once they are polluted with mercury.

In 1995, North American-based auto makers pledged to phase-out mercury-containing switches, but it has taken them years longer than expected, resulting in Maine in hundreds of thousands of mercury switches that will be crushed along with the vehicles unless a recycling system is enacted. The bill before the Legislature was assembled by a year-long task force in which all sides of the issue were included. The modest result could make a real difference in Maine and deserves legislative approval.