Tag: toxic substances

EXTRACTING MERCURY FROM THE DENTIST’S OFFICE

  • Lorraine Kellerman operates the mercury separator in one dental office. Kellerman says it's easy and satisfying to recycle the mercury.

Health officials warn pregnant women and children to avoid eating certain kinds of fish. Mercury built up in the fish can damage the nervous system and impair children’s mental development. The National Academy of Sciences says at least 60,000 American children are born at risk for impaired development every year because their mothers were exposed to mercury. Mercury has been eliminated from paint, batteries, and other products. Now, some dentists are doing their part to reduce the mercury going into the environment. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:

Transcript

Health officials warn pregnant women and children to avoid eating certain kinds of fish.
Mercury built up in the fish can damage the nervous system and impair children’s mental
development. The National Academy of Sciences says at least 60,000 American children
are born at risk for impaired development every year because their mothers were exposed
to mercury. Mercury has been eliminated from paint, batteries, and other products. Now,
some dentists are doing their part to reduce the mercury going into the environment. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:


Mercury is an essential part of dental amalgam, the silver stuff used to fill cavities. The
mercury keeps the amalgam soft until it’s pressed into the cavity, then it bonds to form a
very stable, durable filling. The problem is the small bits of amalgam that are left over
after the cavity is filled. The suction hose that cleans them out of your mouth generally
dumps them down the drain. So they can easily end up in a lake or river, where they can
be eaten by fish.


The average dental office creates about a half pound of waste mercury every year. Just a
tiny portion of that would be enough to warrant fish advisories.


“The amount that’s sewered from dental offices is probably the largest input to the sewer
system.”


Tim Tuominen is a pollution prevention specialist with the Western Lake Superior
Sanitary District in Duluth. He’s been working with dentists in the city for nearly ten
years to reduce the mercury they wash down the drain.


He started with the vacuum systems nearly all dentists already have. When the suction
hose whisks amalgam out of your mouth, the pieces are held in a container to keep them
from damaging the vacuum pump. Tuominen showed the dentists how to empty the
container and bring the contents to the district’s recycling program.


In the first two years, the amount of mercury coming into Duluth’s wastewater treatment
plant was cut in half, and it’s been reduced even further since then.


To cut down on mercury even more, Tuominen got a grant to buy more expensive
equipment that captures up to 99% of the amalgam. He offered the equipment free to any
dentist who would agree to use it.


“I’ll go in and install them, train the assistants and the dentists how they operate, that only
takes about half an hour, then after six months I show them how to manage the solids
particles that collect in them over that time period. So it’s really pretty simple.”


Most of the dental offices in Duluth have installed the systems, and Tuominen expects the
rest to follow suit.


Lorraine Kellerman operates the system in one dental office. Once a week she empties
the chair-side traps and puts the chunks of amalgam into a container for recycling. Then
she goes down to the basement where a tank, like an aquarium, collects the finer particles.
The heavy amalgam settles to the bottom of the tank.


“We just put the hose in the drain, turn the lever, and you just wait ’til the fluid runs out
and then you can come back down, it doesn’t take long, it only takes a few minutes
basically.”


Once a year the amalgam that collects at the bottom is cleaned out and recycled.


Kellerman’s boss is dentist Jim Westman.


“The beauty of this technology is in its simplicity. Gravity works, it’s simple, it’s very
inexpensive.”


Westman says the dentists in Duluth are happy to use the equipment. It costs about
$500, and the recycling charge is about $50 a year.


Westman is chair of the Minnesota Dental Association’s environmental committee. It’s
been working on a plan to help dentists around the state of Minnesota reduce their output
of mercury. Westman says they want to make it easy for dentists.


“No matter where someone has question in regards to what’s going to work in my
equipment, there’s so many variations from one office to the next, who are my resources
to call or handling, transport, process materials, it’s that who you going to call side of the
question that’s going to make a difference as we build a bigger program. ”


If the voluntary program catches on in Minnesota, it could spread to other states. Michael
Bender is director of the Mercury Policy Project, a national organization working to
reduce mercury in the environment. He says dentists around the country are beginning to
feel they should do their part.


“It’s part of the cost of doing business. It’s not going to break any dentist’s back
financially to cover the cost of doing whatever it takes to be a good business, responsible
to the community, responsible to the environment.”


In December, the Environmental Protection Agency is convening a meeting on dental
mercury. The agency will publish information on ways state and local governments can
keep dental mercury out of the environment.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

FDA’S ROLE IN MERCURY MONITORING

Recent press reports indicate that the Food and Drug Administration may soon consider lifting a four-year moratorium on mercury testing in fish. But FDA officials say there never was a moratorium. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Matt Shafer Powell has more:

Transcript

Recent press reports indicate that the Food and Drug Administration may soon consider
lifting a four-year moratorium on mercury testing in fish. But FDA officials say there
never was a moratorium. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Matt Shafer Powell has
more:


Officials at the FDA say they take all possible food contamination seriously. As a result,
they say they never stopped testing for mercury in fish. Michael Bender of the Mercury
Policy Project believes that’s partially true. He says the FDA has continually done what’s
known as a “market basket survey”. That’s a small sampling of the most popular kinds
of fish. But he says the agency did scale back on more comprehensive testing four years
ago.


“They still continue with their market basket survey, so you can’t say they didn’t do any
testing. But, you know, in order to get an adequate sampling size, you’ve got to do
hundreds of samples.”


The FDA did issue an advisory last year about the dangers of eating too much of certain
kinds of predatory fish, like shark. But Bender says the agency used old data and old
standards to support the advisory. He says more comprehensive testing over the last few
years might have lead to warnings about other kinds of fish as well.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Matt Shafer Powell.

Voters Love the Lakes

The Michigan Legislature voted recently to ban new oil and gas drilling under the Great Lakes. Until the ban was enacted, Michigan had been the only state considering to allow such drilling. As the nation heads into a new round of federal, state, and local elections, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Cameron Davis says that the region’s drilling debate provides some invaluable lessons for candidates:

Transcript

The Michigan legislature voted recently to ban new oil and gas drilling under the Great Lakes. Until now, it had been the major holdout on such a ban. As the nation heads into a new round of federal, state, and local elections, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Cameron Davis says that the region’s drilling debate provides some invaluable lessons for candidates.

The first lesson to our future leaders is to beware of one element of news “spin”- that if you repeat something long enough it will become true. In pressing their case, oil and gas interests said that drilling would not result in oil bubbling up to pollute Great Lakes water. As a result, they repeated, drilling was quote -“safe.” They failed to listen, however, to citizens troubled by something different: oil and toxic hydrogen sulfide leaks on land that could put human health and fragile coasts at risk. Given the small amount of oil and gas below the lakes, citizens said drilling wasn’t worth it. So, we get to lesson number one: Our future leaders should define public safety and environmental health broadly, not so narrowly that they gloss over legitimate concerns.

Lesson number 2: the debate was as much about the need for states to be credible leaders in natural resource protection as it was about drilling itself. The Lake Michigan Federation looked at 30 active wells in Michigan and found that eight of them had in fact contaminated water supplies. According to the same research, state oversight continues to fail in the clean up of any of those sites. In the drilling debate, citizens believed that without responsive agency action, the only way to prevent similar damage from shoreline drilling was to prohibit the practice in the first place. Congress responded to citizens’ concerns over the summer by suspending new drilling for two years. Candidates can take away from this that if states don’t want Congress stepping on their toes, they need to do a credible job themselves of protecting the Great Lakes.

Last, pro-drilling interests argued during the debate that other serious challenges besides drilling deserved more attention. While concerned citizens believed that a drilling ban was the best way to prevent new shoreline damage, advocates also agree that a number of other important threats need to be addressed. The third moral of the story is that people’s interest in protecting the Great Lakes environment from drilling is the beginning, not the end.

It’s time to move onto other pressing threats such as harmful water diversions in an increasingly thirsty world. We need to prevent future invasions of foreign pest species like the zebra mussel that throw the multi-billion dollar Great Lakes fishery out of whack. With women of childbearing age and other sensitive populations unable to eat certain fish because of contamination, it’s time to eliminate cancer-causing and other pollution once and for all. And, it’s time to restore fish and wildlife habitat, including the region’s precious wetlands, forests, and sand dunes.

Voters love the Great Lakes. Because of that, whoever commits first in upcoming elections to protect them, wins.

Upgrading Computer Recycling

  • Computers and computer equipment, such as these keyboards, are often thrown in the trash when they break or become obsolete. Efforts are underway to find a safe and effective method for recycling the growing electronic waste stream.

As older computers become obsolete, we’re faced with a dilemma: what to do with the out-of-date equipment? The problem will only grow as personal computers become a stock item in more and more households. But so far, the manufacturers, the recycling industry, and the government don’t have a plan in place to deal with the old equipment. That’s a problem because some of that equipment contains lead, mercury, and other toxic materials that can cause damage to the environment and people’s health. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has more:

To learn more about computer recycling efforts, you can visit: National Electronics Product Stewardship Initiative, Electronic Industries Alliance, and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

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UPGRADING COMPUTER RECYCLING (Short Version)

  • Computers and computer equipment, such as these keyboards, are often thrown in the trash when they break or become obsolete. Efforts are underway to find a safe and effective method for recycling the growing electronic waste stream. Photo by Mark Brush.

The U.S. is trying to figure out what to do with tens-of-millions of computers and monitors that go bad or become obsolete each year. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has details:

To learn more about computer recycling efforts, you can visit: National Electronics Product Stewardship Initiative, Electronic Industries Alliance, and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

Greener Cleaners

  • Joseph DeSimone, founder and chairman of Micell Technologies, explains the cleaning process that clothes undergo in his Hanger’s store in Morrisville, NC.

Consumers may not realize it, but the simple act of dropping off clothes at the cleaners could end up harming the environment. For decades, dry cleaners have used a toxic solvent to clean clothes. Now there are many contaminated former dry cleaning sites across the country. But a solution to the dry cleaning problem may now be available. A new chain of cleaners is touting a “greener” system that uses a non-toxic everyday substance. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Patty Murray has more: