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Inside EPA WASHINGTON, D.C., USA, 17 November 2000 -- Environmentalists from over thirty national and international environmental groups are urging President Clinton to sign a draft executive order that would require the federal government to establish a national policy and implementation plan to retire mercury from the stream of commerce and place it in a federal mercury stockpile run by the Department of Defense (DOD). The environmentalists are also strongly urging EPA Administrator Carol Browner to support the draft executive order. Under the draft executive order, DOD would store at their Defense National Stockpile Center -- which currently holds almost ten million pounds of mercury -- recovered mercury from industrial waste streams. The draft order also calls for the creation of a task force to oversee the development and use of technology to stabilize the mercury stockpile long-term. In a Nov. 14 letter to Browner, environmentalists contend that EPA should take a lead role in developing an action plan for the eventual elimination of mercury and establish interagency agreements for mercury storage to get it out of commercial use. The draft executive order and the letter to Browner are available on our web site, InsideEPA.com. The draft executive order is scheduled to be sent to Clinton and Browner Nov. 15, two days after Defense Under Secretary J.S. Gansler told Maine Gov. Angus King (R) that the agency could not accept into the stockpile 260,000 pounds of excess mercury being displaced by the closing of a Maine chlor-alkali company, HoltraChem Manufacturing. DOD's decision means the mercury will be handed over to a broker that had contracted with the closing facility to buy the mercury for later resale overseas. King, along with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), all four members of the state's congressional delegation and environmentalists, had been urging DOD officials for months to accept the mercury into DOD's stockpile rather than allow it to return back into the commercial stream. But Gansler told King in a Nov. 13 letter that DOD could not accept the waste because federal law prohibits DOD from storing toxic or hazardous material not owned by the agency. Gansler said that while federal law provides an exception when “essential to protect the public from imminent danger,” this situation does not appear to present such a circumstance. Gansler notes that mercury is a material used by several industries and there is an active commercial market for the metal. At the same time, Gansler said the Strategic & Critical Materials Stock Piling Act requires Congress to authorize the acquisition of any material for the stockpile. “As the Department for several years has reported to the Congress that the entire existing inventory of mercury held by the [stockpile] is excess to Stockpile requirements, it is unlikely that the Congress would authorize acquisition of additional mercury,” the letter says. One DOD source says that “there is not only one possible course of action” for the mercury and said that DOD and EPA have worked with the Maine DEP and lawmakers to develop other strategies for removing the mercury from commerce. Environmentalists and Maine lawmakers have also sought EPA's help in pushing DOD to accept the mercury. But EPA officials say they decided not to get involved because it was not clear that taking the mercury out of commercial circulation was the “most effective method” to establish useful national standards for mercury. Citing that mercury is still actively used as a commodity, EPA sources note the likely possibility that more mercury will be mined in the future, regardless of what happens to the 260,000 pounds of the metal that remain at the Maine facility. “This issue isn't as self-evident as it appears to be,” one EPA source says. Nevertheless, environmentalists are concerned that EPA passed up an opportunity to set a precedent with the HoltraChem mercury. Environmentalists say they trace the facilities' closing to a 1994 agreement between the Chorine Institute and EPA to have the industry cut mercury use by 50 percent by 2005. However, they say that rather than cutting mercury use at these facilities by shifting to cleaner technologies, many facilities are simply shutting down because of the costs involved with technology upgrades. These closures are resulting in an increase in mercury shipments to the commercial market. And since EPA and DOD decided to skirt the opportunity to create standards for industrial mercury, environmentalists say that millions of pounds of mercury will be released for commercial use and then eventually find its way into the environment, or will be shipped to third world countries where standards are even lower than they are in the United States. FAIR USE NOTICE. This document contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The Basel Action Network is making this article available in our efforts to advance understanding of ecological sustainability and environmental justice issues. We believe that this constitutes a `fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond `fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. More News |