By Darren Samuelsohn, Greenwire

DF Goldsmith Mercury is the U.S. mineral refiner that sold the mercury to undisclosed Indian businesses. The Evanston, Ill., company purchased the controversial material - which amounts to 118 tons of mercury - from the HoltraChem Manufacturing Co. after the latter closed its Orrington, Maine, chlorine and caustic plant last September.

According to Indian media reports, dock workers in Bombay feared handling the metal and refused to unload it. The director of India's Ministry of Environment and Forests in New Delhi told the Boston Globe earlier this month that they were unsure what to do with the shipment.

Officials at the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C., said they were unaware of the situation and declined comment.

According to the State Department source, the shipment may have made it as far as Port Said, Egypt. It is unclear where the mercury will go once it returns to the United States or if more mercury is scheduled for shipment.

There are 14 tons of mercury from the original amount at Mercury Waste Solutions in Albany, N.Y., which is where the India-bound shipment originated. An additional 19 tons have been shipped to Illinois while the remainder is in Maine, said Jennifer Post, a spokesperson at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

The top two U.S. government agencies involved in the matter, confirming statements from DF Goldsmith President Don Goldsmith, have said the mercury shipment is a legal business transaction, both here and in India.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials reasoned that the mercury in question is not a hazardous waste because it was being shipped for reuse. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 requires the United States to give notice to a foreign country if it is going to be on the receiving end of a hazardous shipment. Thus, no such message went out to India, said Robert Heiss, EPA's director of the import-export program in the office of enforcement and compliance assurance.

The State Department, meanwhile, found that Indian law does not prohibit mercury imports for commercial use, leading U.S. officials to question what motivated the country to not accept the shipment. China is by far the world's leader in mercury imports, but India has nonetheless long been an active industrial mercury hub, importing hundreds of tons annually. Chlor-alkali plants are common in India, which is also home to one of the world's largest mercury-thermometer manufacturers.

According to U.S. Geologic Survey statistics, the United States exported 96 tons of mercury to India in 1993, 144 tons in 1994, 33 in 1995, none in 1996 and 1997, less than 2 tons in 1998 and a leap back to 85 tons in 1999.

Mercury is a naturally occurring metal with a long history of human uses. It has been found in Egyptian tombs dating back to 1500 B.C. More recently, scientists have said that the substance can behave as a neurotoxin in certain forms and harm unborn children if ingested by pregnant women. Mercury thermometers have been pulled from store shelves in Boston, San Francisco, New Hampshire and a number of U.S. retailers, including KMart and Wal-Mart.

Mike Belliveau, the toxics project leader at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, said he fears that should the mercury shipment make it to India, it would eventually find its way back to the United States in thermometers.

About 35 percent of the 2 million thermometers annually imported into the United States come from India, he said.

Belliveau's group, Greenpeace and Indian environmentalists have been trying to halt the shipment while also calling for an international policy to phase out the world's largest quantities of mercury.

The State Department source said that since there is no scientific means yet discovered for the disposal of mercury, pushing environmental concerns on developing nations creates detrimental and perhaps unintended effects on their economies.

"We're talking about a commercial transaction which has been, for lack of a better word, demagogued by environmental groups who would be by their own particular philosophy opposed to mercury use in any fashion or any form," the source said. "While the philosophy is very nice, it doesn't take into account the knowledge that countries with lesser developed economies often are required by necessity to use lesser developed technologies