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Toxic Trade: The Global Metallic Mercury Market

It will take an international solution to curb the world's mercury pollution problem -- and the United States should lead the way.

	MERCURY POLLUTION HITS HOME
	Mercury pollution can become concentrated in certain fish, which when eaten can cause serious health problems, especially for children and pregnant women. Protect your family -- visit Mercury Contamination in Fish: a guide to staying healthy and fighting back.

Mercury, a potent neurotoxin, does not observe international borders. Unlike some other pollutants, airborne mercury can travel great distances before being deposited in waterways. Once the mercury enters a waterway, naturally occurring bacteria absorb it and convert it to a form called methyl mercury and it then moves up the food chain into fish. As a result, mercury escaping from outdated chemical factories in, say, India can easily turn up in fish caught by anglers in the U.S. Great Lakes or sold at a Manhattan grocery store. That's why the global problem of mercury pollution needs a global solution.

Mercury Poses Serious Health Hazards

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that every year hundreds of thousands of American newborns are at risk for problems with fine motor skills and learning difficulties as a result of their mothers' fish consumption during pregnancy. Emerging research also links mercury exposure with cardiovascular disease in adult men, and scientists continue to raise flags about additional health threats posed by mercury exposure.

Where Mercury Comes From

Coal-burning power plants are the most common source of mercury pollution. Coal is naturally contaminated with mercury, and when it is burned, the mercury simply goes up the smokestack and into the air.

Another very significant source of mercury pollution is metallic mercury, used in a number of commercial products and industrial processes. The most polluting of these uses include chemical manufacturing (chlor-alkali plants), battery manufacturing, small-scale gold mining, and production of switches, measuring devices, and other products.

In recent decades, developed nations have substantially reduced their use of this highly toxic metal. However, the surpluses created by declining industrial use of mercury have too often been allowed to flood the global marketplace. And this cheap mercury has fueled a sharp increase in the use of mercury in developing nations.

According to a recent study for the European Commission, nearly 3,700 metric tonnes of mercury are purchased around the world each year for various industrial purposes. This global mercury trade continues despite the fact that non-mercury-based alternatives are readily available for most current uses. For example, chlor-alkali plants, which use mercury to convert salt to chlorine gas and caustic (lye), are a significant source of mercury pollution throughout the world, including in the United States. Every bit of that is needless pollution, however, because non-mercury-based processes can yield the same products without the use of mercury.

The heavy use of mercury in the developing world has created a serious pollution problem that will only be solved by a cooperative international effort. Most developing nations have no effective regulations to protect exposed workers and the environment. And, of course, since mercury travels so easily, mercury pollution in the developing world is a problem the world over. Simply put, the current laissez-faire global market in this toxic substance is a dangerous threat to the world's children -- it endangers this generation and will threaten future generations.

The Major Mercury Suppliers and Buyers

There are four main pathways by which mercury arrives on the global market: "virgin" mercury mining; "by-product" mercury recovered from mining other metals such as silver, copper, or zinc; "recovered/recycled" mercury removed from products or processes; and "inventory mercury" from preexisting stockpiles and storage. Key players in the international mercury trade include:

Kyrgyzstan and China are the two countries that continue to mine virgin mercury, and only Kyrgyzstan mines for export; China uses all its virgin mercury for its own production. Both countries' mines are all government-sponsored or -owned and are heavily subsidized. The low price of mercury, created by the veritable glut of cheap mercury, has driven private mines out of business.

The European Union supplies approximately 30 percent of the global mercury stockpile and is involved in more than half the global trade in mercury, even though it accounts for only 10 percent of the world's demand for mercury. E.U. "decommissioning" policies, which require mercury-based chlor-alkali manufacturing plants to be converted to non-mercury-based production processes, have contributed a large supply of surplus mercury to the global trade pool. But the E.U. has recently committed to keeping this surplus mercury out of the global marketplace by storing it instead of selling it. This milestone commitment will prevent more than 12,000 tonnes of mercury from flooding the global market, a circumstance that would have made mercury cheaper and thus more attractive to buy and use.

China and India alone appear to be responsible for more than 50 percent of global mercury demand annually, making them the top two -national consumers in the world. China's principal use of mercury is thought to be vinyl-chloride and battery manufacturing; India's heaviest use is for mercury-based chlor-alkali plants. African and South American countries also use a large and still growing amount of mercury in small-scale gold mining, a process in which mercury is heated and released nearly in its entirety to the atmosphere.

Information Gaps Make It Hard to Track the Mercury Trade

Following the trail of mercury across multiple borders can be difficult. A quantity of mercury might be recovered from a Western European mercury-cell chlor-alkali plant, sold to a Spanish mercury mining and trading company, shipped to Germany for conversion into mercuric oxide, and sold to mainland China for the manufacture of button-cell batteries. The batteries could then be exported to Hong Kong for incorporation into mass-produced watches that are then shipped to the United States or the European Union. This sort of globetrotting traffic in mercury greatly diminishes the positive impact of rules that a developed country may have put in place to eliminate sources of mercury pollution within its borders.

Existing methods for tracking the global mercury trade are inadequate, sometimes failing to provide adequate or consistent data. For instance, the Concorde East West report for the European Commission notes that Mexico stated that it had imported 1,197 tonnes of mercury from the United States in 2000, and 1,340 tonnes in 2001. For those same years, the United States documented exporting only 7 and 12 tonnes, respectively, to Mexico. Meanwhile, the U.S. Geological Survey used to carefully track mercury use within the United States but has stopped collecting this data.

Better tracking systems are crucial to understanding the impact of the global mercury trade and to creating responsible solutions.

An International Solution for an International Problem

Given the complex web of the mercury trade -- and the dangers associated with using mercury -- the international community needs to take several immediate actions:

Nations that use a lot of mercury -- including the United States -- must agree to perform more accurate inventories of the use and trade of mercury.

Governments must develop policies to reduce the global excess of mercury supply, for example by phasing out virgin mercury mining and stockpiling the excess expected from the chlor-alkali industry conversion in Western Europe and elsewhere.

The world's nations should reduce their use of mercury wherever possible, focusing first on the largest, most contaminating uses of the chemical for which there are readily available non-mercury alternatives.

These steps will ratchet down worldwide mercury supply and demand in a manner that will result in its gradual phase-out. Analysis shows that global mercury demand can be reduced by half or more without undue disruption of commerce or the need for technology innovation or transfer.

A Stronger U.S. Policy Is Needed

To date, U.S. policy on mercury has been ill-advised, both domestically and internationally. President Bush's "Clear Skies" proposal would let coal-burning power plants in the United States pollute longer and more heavily, and recent rules for emissions from the chlor-alkali sector failed to address the bulk of the mercury used in and escaping from these plants. The story is no better on the international front: At the most recent United Nations Environment Program negotiation meeting on mercury, the United States opposed establishing targets or goals for global reductions and did not support any coordinated strategy to reduce global supply or demand.

Instead of stalling and resisting, a strong U.S. mercury policy would commit the federal government to:

Develop and promote -- through the United Nations and other international bodies -- aggressive global goals for mercury reduction and a coordinated multilateral action plan for phasing out the major uses of mercury in commerce (batteries, chlor-alkali, small-scale mining, various mercury products like switches, and dental amalgams for fillings);

Implement quick reductions in U.S. sources of mercury demand domestically, starting with the largest and most readily replaceable uses -- mercury-based chlor-alkali plants, for example;

Strengthen regulation of mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants;

Continue holding in stockpiles surplus mercury from the Department of Defense and Energy, in order to keep that mercury out of the global stream of commerce;

Pass legislation to prohibit the export of surplus mercury into global commerce;

Supply both technical and financial assistance to mercury-trading countries in the developing world to help them inventory and phase out their most environmentally damaging uses of mercury;