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Surprise! More Than Twice As Much Mercury In Environment As Thought
sciencehabit writes The most comprehensive estimate of mercury released into the environment is putting a new spotlight on the potent neurotoxin. By accounting for mercury in consumer products, such as thermostats, and released by industrial processes, the calculations more than double previous tallies of the amount of mercury that has entered the environment since 1850. The analysis also reveals a previously unknown spike in mercury emissions during the 1970s, caused largely by the use of mercury in latex paint.
Broken fluorescent light bulbs may be e cause here.
Where did this mercury come from originally? Aren't we really just sending it home?
This is mercury that was produced and not necessarily in the open environment. Not sure what the point of this is.
You'll be amazed by how much toxic material ends up in a place you wouldn't expect!
Top 11 heavy metals released by industry!
Guess which neurotoxin scientists have found in the environment?
So you're saying mercury that's contained is "released to the environment" ... brilliant.
And how much of the mercury "released to the environment" is naturally released? Give you a hint, it's significant in parts of california, but deliberately ignored because that doesn't get funding like the larger quantity of mercury that entered the ecosystem from gold mining. Yes, believe it or not, this stuff does come from nature, just like every other heavy metal.
Rather than post something intelligent you point your finger at "those rascally Republicans"? CFLs are gnarly and contain mercury...EPA directions for cleaning a CFL break should scare people, but they are a small part of the problem (soon to be worse as CFLs really start filling our landfills). Those Republicans aren't anti-science no matter how many times you Liberals claim as such.
Where is "Environment"? I've never heard of a place by that name. Or was the headline about ambient mercury in "the environment"?
The good news is that finding out that there is twice as much of it around means that it is half as harmful as we were thinking it was, assuming the retarded LNT model preferred by statists everywhere.
See that "Preview" button?
THIS. CFLs are the worst idea ever for pollution. Landfills brimming with millions of small amounts of mercury that add up quickly. I bought 10 CFLs thinking they would last for the advertised ten years. They lasted less than two years. All went to the CFL recycler, but imagine all of the people who throw them out.
A bit of calculation will show that CFLs are likely to save more mercury by decreasing the amount of coal burned, even if you smashed each one on the ground at the end of life. A huge fraction of anthropogenic environmental mercury comes from burning coal. Overall, they are almost certainly a net reduction in anthropogenic mercury. I don't think they're great, but they are a reasonable stop-gap solution until LEDs take over.
There is nothing anti-science about having slaves and beating women. These issues are orthogonal to the science / anti-science issue.
I would be more surprised if we found significant amounts of Neptune, Uranus or Pluto...
or chemtrails (lol)
Except CFLs are regulated to have less than 2.5mg of mercury in and some will no doubt have a lot less.
CFLs prevent more mercury from being released into the environment via coal than they release: ...
How much Mercury is in Compact Fluorescent ( CFL ) bulbs , watch
Of course LEDs are better, do you have an argument against those?
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Also, the 48" straight florescent bulbs that everyone use to have in their garage and above their workbench contained 85 mg of mercury (per bulb) up through 1990; are now limited (!) to 25 mg. Haven't heard any complaints about those from the rolling coal set.
sPh
Coal is messy stuff, with all sorts of wierd elements in it. hundreds of millions of tons of coal is burned each year. Most of those elements are not toxic in very low doses in the environment, so we don't care about them. Directly burning coal can be quite messy, and make air difficult to breathe, like secondhand smoke. Thanks to modern pulverized coal boilers, and scubbers, a lot of the worst of coal has been tamed. America made of bunch of changes in the 70s. China has been moving to modern coal power plants with scrubbers.
There is nothing anti-science about having slaves and
Of course that is anti-science. Any economist would tell you that it is much cheaper to just get rid of minimum wage and overtime laws and then put your workers in a company town than it is to import, purchase and maintain slaves.
Different kind of Mercury. The kind is most industrial is the kind that your body can't get rid of, so it just builds up. The kind in shots/jabs is a kind your body can expel quite quickly.
That's just saying it's uneconomic. It has fuck-all to do with science.
Were the latex paint people jealous of the oil based lead paint people and all the attention they were getting? Lead and mercury have been known to be hazardous for decades prior to the 70s. Why in a million years would they think that it was a good idea. Minimally with the late 60s and 70s being a huge eco movement time any company would think twice before potentially attracting the attention of a combination of the health authorities, the eco crowd, and shows like 60 minutes.
I wonder if the huge crime spikes of the 60's and 70's had this mercury as another contributing factor?
I am not sure how much mercury is used in gold mining. However, the fact is that some poor people use mercury in order to "capture" gold, and they then evaporate the mercury.
... ca. 1953, my daddy worked in a oil refinery and he'd bring home small sample bottles full of mercury.
We puzzled at it, amazed at how heavy the bottle was and stuff. We poured some in our hands and rolled it around.
Then we coated dimes and pennies with it to make them look like silver and played with those.
Fast-forward 25 years and I'm an instrument man in an oil refinery lab and I'm calibrating a pneumatic gauge with a manometer that uses lots of mercury and I get a case of the dumbass and blow mercury all the way to the ceiling, all over counter tops and on the flour.
They evacuated the entire lab and sent in the hazmat team and stuff.
It's funny how things change with education and I never experienced any fallout from the big white letter E on my keyboard with the bluetooth that clasps to the ballpoint pen of my mother's daisy.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Citation?
Yet another completely idiotic troll post from slashdot's resident moron. I also have to mention in passing that the law which shoved CFLs down consumers' throats was enacted by the Democrat controlled House and Senate in 2007. So thank your heros Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for that one.
Or did you think Lincoln was a Democrat?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
As soon as I heard that mercury was dangerous, I threw all my thermometers and thermostats in the garbage.
Have gnu, will travel.
Mercury was used as a bacteriacide and mildewcide in many latex paints through the late 80's. Skane M-8 was a common one. It was much cheaper than alternative products, and more effective. No one wanted their latex paint to smell like rotten eggs when they opened a can of latex paint. It also slowed down mildew buildup on painted basement walls and exterior surfaces. Mercury was not considered as dangerous as it is now, as all paint companies followed legal EPA guidelines when formulating their paints.
Surprise! More Than Twice As Much Mercury In Environment As Thought
Here are a couple more Slashdot headlines in this new style:
Fuck's sake! Facebook's Auto-Play Videos Chew Up Expensive Data Plans
About Bloody Time! 3 Decades Later, Finnair Pilots Report Dramatic Close Encounter With a Missile
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Right. Political parties today totally equal political parties of 150 years ago. You must be either 200 years old and know things we don't, or 20 years old and know nothing. I'm betting on the latter.
Now there is a lot more mercury available to be put, in elemental form, into vaccines.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Mersury is a naturally-occurring substance. That's right, boys and girls, contrary to what some hyperventilating soccer-mom or EPA bureaucrat may have told you: mercury, lead, arsenic, asbestos, and uranium ALL are natural substances that have always been in nature, and always will be. This is what makes most of the EPA a scam. When the EPA was created in the 1970s there really were big pollution problems but the EPA was permitted to regulate NOT on levels of substances known to cause harm but rather on levels that could be detected... and now after many decades we can detect far smaller quantities of everything. It's now common for towns in America to be ordered to "clean-up" their "polluted" drinking water to higher standards of purity than exist in nature. All this phony outrage over tiny harmless quantities of various substances that have always been there is a great tool that the left uses to justify ever-increasing regulation of individuals and businesses and an unending growth in government.
Good news! Slashdot Beta now live for all users!
go drink a full glass and video tape it and i'm not paying for your casket or for the place we put you while you go stark raving looney
Sticking something into your skin is going to make it WAY harder to get rid of than drinking or breathing it.
#2, Silver Mining. It turns out mountains don't come labelled as "gold" and "silver-only". As world affluence increases, demand for gold and silver increases. Today, affluent trapped from filters at gold mines produces more mercury than mercury mines. But the only mines "trapping" any mercury are in regulated western economies... most gold mining is in unregulated forests.
Lamps, by the way, have jackshit mercury, less than a fraction of what they had when lamp recycling got started. Billions of dollars are being spent "recycling" lamps which have barely any mercury in them.
At least the recycled mercury saves the environment, right? Oh. Nope. Read the great journalist John Fialka on WSJ 2006. Most of the mercury recovered from the recycling went to alluvial gold mining in Amazon and Congo river basins. http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
I'm an environmentalist, but environmentalists 3.0 need to recognize past mistakes, and correct them, the same as engineers and software coders are expected to do.
Gently reply
Whenever I hear the word "neurotoxin" anymore, I think of GLaDOS.
Sorry, I take back the lame insult. I stand by my point, though (as much as AC can stand by anything).
I like to know a little bit about where citations are coming from, you know?
From the Wikipedia entry on the website where all of your citations come from:
I'm not sure the blog site of a climate change denying weatherman and Fox News favorite is a solid source of information, but who knows? Anything's possible when there's money at stake.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Right, Mercury is horribly toxic, and releasing it in the environment is bad. But where do we get the mercury first?
I guess it comes from the environment itself, which suggests some kind of mercury cycle. It was there before as a reasonably harmful compound, perhaps we can ensure it returns to this state?
Is this the case in the US? I know mercury can be used to seperate gold from the other rocks (rocks float but gold sinks I think), but that is only done in third world countries that don't know about better ways to do it. I didn't think it was from pulling the gold from the ground, I thought it was just one possible process for seperating the gold.
I don't know a lot about gold mining, but I think that is not true in the US at least.
After all the mercury that was spilled in gold mining operations....
Rick B.
Not as big a deal as having it in the form of vapour - it's not even a huge deal in landfill unless there's enough water moving through to get it out of the landfill, or biological activity turning the metal into some pretty nasty stuff that can get into the food chain more easily. There's nothing immediately unsafe about an open container of mercury or blobs of it all over the floor from a broken thermometer - the problems arise when it can be breathed in or metabolised into something that's part of the food chain. Mark Twain had his hands deep in the stuff while gold mining with no signs of ill effects, but hatters went mad. That's the difference between it staying completely outside the body as a liquid that cannot penetrate and breathing the stuff in as part of a process involving heat.
Nixon or even Daddy Bush are closer to being Democrats than Republicans in the current situation, let alone Lincoln.
It's a bit misleading to compare the political parties of back then to now since the values have changed so much.
Not as such. Metallic mercury is rare. It's a bit of work to get mercury out of various ores, many of which would probably be safe to crumble up and eat since stomach acid is not going to reduce it.
The Heartland Institute published Watts' preliminary report on weather station data, titled Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?.[12] Watts has been featured as a speaker at Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change, for which he acknowledges receiving payment.[55]
Documents obtained from the Heartland Institute and made public in February 2012 reveal that the Institute had agreed to help Watts raise $88,000 to set up a website,(...)
So, paid for by a fine organization that, apart from the climate change thing, is also known for denying the health effects of second-hand tobacco smoke, promoting franking, and openly advocating free-market environmentalism? A likely story!
Its all the compact flourescent light bulbs.. have you ever read the disposal instructions for one of those!?!?
If you know anything about history it's the Republican party that freed the slaves and, "It emerged in 1854 to combat the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which threatened to extend slavery into the territories, and to promote more vigorous modernization of the economy." Democrats try to change history through repeated rhetoric saying what they want to be the truth and all the youth who get their news solely from Facebook or Twitter parrot their statements in a zombie-like monotone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Is this the case in the US? I know mercury can be used to seperate gold from the other rocks (rocks float but gold sinks I think), but that is only done in third world countries that don't know about better ways to do it. I didn't think it was from pulling the gold from the ground, I thought it was just one possible process for seperating the gold.
I don't know a lot about gold mining, but I think that is not true in the US at least.
Its used in small scale placer mining. You use a pan (or sluice) to separate the heavier material, gold, iron and such, from the lighter rocks, then you add mercury to the black stuff at the bottom of the pan. The mercury and gold combine into an almagram (sp?), much like the paste the dentist mixes up to put in your mouth. Then you heat and evaporate the mercury leaving the gold and perhaps some silver. Since mercury is expensive, usually you evaporate it in a kind of still so you can recapture it. Used to be quite common, not sure now but placer mining is still popular with people making a living from it..
Which also brings up the other use of mercury, making fillings and putting it into peoples teeth where it hopefully stays. Of course if you get cremated the mercury gets released into the environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
No big surprise, gotten use to scientists being wrong. When it comes to the environment, they are just guessing and hoping they are right
My friend is working in the engineering trailer on a project to install additional scrubbers on the nearby coal power plant. It has to be completed within the year, it's definitely happening and is a very real project. This system is much better than the already good system presently being used, but refer you to actually read it:
http://www.wisconsinpublicservice.com/environment/react.aspx
Also take a look at the before and after photo. This is a HUGE project, not some cheap paper filter.
#2, Silver Mining. It turns out mountains don't come labelled as "gold" and "silver-only". As world affluence increases, demand for gold and silver increases.
Don't worry. It turns out that the cost of mercury is rising much faster than the cost of gold. Another decade or so of this, and it will be more economical for the gold miners just to sell their mercury stocks straight back to us.
If all you're going to cite is an anti-science political blog, you may as well not bother.
Hmmm....so they are promoting Congressional postal propaganda (franking)...those bastards!!
Made up bullshit designed to suggest higher costs for something that ideologues don't like.
The irony of someone citing Wikipedia to show some other website is biased and inaccurate.
"I know your site sucksw because Wikipedia, where anyone can post anything, says so."
The difference is that Wikipedia has citations to actual sources that you can check yourself.
The people who accuse Wikipedia of bias never seem to point out what the bias is.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Mad as a hatter
Mercury's in your flu shot
So sorry, we switched to preservative free.
And of course the non-compact ones that have been in your kitchen for decades, you took those to the recycler too when they burned out, right?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Fail for not mentioning naturally occurring mercury. Salmon and lake trout fisherman have known the science about naturally occurring mercury for a long time.
I don't know a lot about gold mining, but I think that is not true in the US at least.
We've been mining the USA for a lot longer than we've had an EPA. I live in Lake County, CA and I have an RO filter because there's a hell of a lot of stuff around here in the water which is harmful for three big reasons. The first reason is that the area is volcanic, the second is that it's agricultural, and the third is not just silver mining but also outright cinnabar mining. Luckily, I live on the side of the lake which is relatively clean. Clear Lake has a lot of thermal turnover, though...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Your body does have methods of dealing with mercury exposure, but it takes time and the right nutrition to pull off and is a stress on the body.
You can , depending on your sensitivity, chelate mercury and make it pass out of the body in your urine, but it is a slow process.
There are loads of nutritional regimens to deal with mild mercury poisoning of various types.
Vitamin C can detoxify mercury , chelation is the standard practice in medicine, but it will mobilize stored mercury in fat and bone and if you are not having symptoms of mercury poisoning , you will notice them once the mercury is mobilized through chelation.
There are a load of dentists who advocate careful removal of mercury amalgam fillings, and they suggest 5 grams a day of vitamin C along with chelation therapy and most importantly taking the right amino acids to raise one's Glutathione levels as this is the most effective way of detoxifying.
There are lots of reports linking mild mercury toxicity (sub - mad hatter level) in sensitive individuals to auto-immune conditions such as type 1 diabetes among other things. Removal of dental amalgam fillings and replacement with more advanced polymer composite fillings has resulted in significant reduction of auto- immune symptoms in sensitive individuals over time.
I had been researching this and was surprised to find that my amalgam fillings were put in right about 10 years before my diagnosis with type 1 diabetes. It is also known that autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes tend to start about a decade before they are diagnosed and the timing on this was something that I was concerned about.
The report here, this article does do a lot to explain why type 1 diabetes has been reaching epidemic proportions along with type 2 diabetes which seems to correlate more with over consumption of high fructose corn syrup in the diet (if you check it is basically in everything in the US.) The High fructose corn syrup thing didn't explain the prevalence of type 1 which is basically exploding in proportion in my generation (gen-x) There are other contributing factors , such as low vitamin -d levels, low sun exposure, certain allergies and a genetic component that predisposes some to a sensitivity to some factor causing auto--immunity. Mercury exposure might just be the culprit.
I know this I have an appointment with my dentist and my doctor to have chelation therapy and to have my amalgam fillings removed by a dentist that is well equipped to remove them safely.
I live in California where Hg occurs in nature and was used in extraction of gold from ores and has a latency in sediments shed from mining in the Mother Lode. USGS has been looking for the signature of Hg in sediments and it may be delayed by the mobilization process. More was applied to ores than has yet appeared in sediments. My source for the path of Hg in sediments comes from a video I saw authored by USGS in about 2000. I am sure that there are links to papers on the subject. Part of the problem of Hg in the environment in California is that its ores are found in the Coast Range and so it is a natural constituant of the environment. Most of the time it is pretty insoluable.
I mention this because that is what the chart in the link from the article seems to indicate. The spike in total Hg at 1970 and its elevated concentration is due in part to landfills, but the more recent uptick seems to be due to its mobilization in the atmosphere. This would coincide with the concern from USGS about its path in sediments. The metal is pretty insoluable, but conversion to its salts and organic versions are more volitile and take time, decades, to appear in the environment.
Heh lol... looks like my autocorrect is the product of a right-wing conspiracy
Hmm, good enough reasons to consider appropriate precautions. And considering that we don't know what the safe lower exposure limit for mercury is (assuming that it's significantly different to the homeopathic concentration), that's going to need some careful thought.
Sorry, what's an "RO filter"? Run-Off? (I wouldn't have thought that snow-melt and rainfall from a clean roof would have picked up much ; unless you're horribly dusty, when you've got other issues to attend to.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Sorry, what's an "RO filter"?
Reverse osmosis, which uses water pressure both to push water through a plastic membrane (the osmosis part) but also to back-flush the filter. An "efficient" RO filter wastes about 10 parts of water for each 1 part filtered, but we have a well and a septic system so no harm done really.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ah, got you. Still needs appreciable power, but being a continuous load, that's not a major issue. The water makers on board are RO too, feeding and washing a couple of hundred (very) sweaty bodies. But for big fresh water requirements (hundreds of cu. m. ) we bring in non-potable water on one of the flotilla boats.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"