by Susan Young, Bangor Daily News

The 80 tons of mercury, which was used to make chlorine and other chemicals mainly for paper companies, is slated to be hauled away from the shuttered plant in the coming weeks. It will go to a mercury-recycling facility in Pennsylvania, according to an attorney for D.F. Goldsmith Chemical and Metal Co., the wholesale company that purchased the toxic metal from HoltraChem.

"Everything is going," said John Bullock. The lawyer said mercury will begin leaving Orrington as soon as it is placed in large steel containers, which will be "not next week, but the following week."

Fifty tons already have been taken from the facility, but the removal stopped after environmental groups protested the shipment of one 18-ton load to India last year. Because of the outcry from activists in the United States and India, the Indian government said it would refuse the cargo. The shipment was turned back and is reported to be on the way back to the U.S.

Because of the political fallout, Goldsmith asked the Maine Department of Environmental Protection in early February to stop classifying the used mercury as a hazardous waste. Most other states classify the mercury as a salable commodity.

The hazardous-waste label made it difficult to transport and sell the mercury, the company said in a letter to the DEP earlier this month. Bullock said the mercury is 99.56 percent pure.

The DEP refused the request, saying the hazardous-waste label was warranted and simply required special handling by a licensed waste hauling company.

A couple of weeks later, Goldsmith called the DEP to ask that it be allowed to remove the remaining mercury, using a licensed waste-hauling company, and ship it to Bethlehem Apparatus Co., a Pennsylvania corporation that is the world's largest mercury recycler.

The DEP approved this request last week.

The mercury will be taken away by St. Joseph Motor Lines of Woodland, Penn., in tractor-trailer trucks. The company is licensed to transport hazardous waste in Maine.

Once Bethlehem Apparatus reprocesses the mercury, Bullock said he didn't know where it would go but that it likely would be resold.

This prospect means there is no reason for environmental groups to celebrate the mercury's departure from HoltraChem.

"Moving the mercury out of Maine doesn't solve the mercury problem," said Michael Belliveau, toxics project director for the Natural Resources Council of Maine. The group is part of a coalition called the Penobscot Alliance for Mercury Elimination, which seeks to stop the use of mercury and its shipment from the U.S. to countries with less stringent environmental regulations.

"Some of it will come back [here] in polluted rain and polluted snow,"

Belliveau said of the mercury.

Because the U.S. has more mercury than it can use, much of it is exported overseas to countries such as India where it is used in plants like HoltraChem or to make thermometers and other medical devices.

"The release of 80 tons of mercury into commerce means that more mercury will go to India one way or another," Belliveau said.

Bethlehem Apparatus has supplied mercury to a Unilever thermometer plant in India, he said.

Belliveau said "concerned people" are trying to track where the mercury from HoltraChem ultimately will end up. They successfully tracked the shipment headed for India and caused its recall.

If there is anything positive to come out of the HoltraChem saga, he said, it is that lawmakers have become more aware of mercury and its hazards. The metal is known to cause birth defects and is especially dangerous to young children and fetuses.

Although it appears to be too late for the HoltraChem mercury, U.S. Sen.

Susan Collins has introduced federal legislation to set up a national task force which will look for ways to permanently take used mercury out of circulation so it is not traded around the globe. Her bill also would ban the sale of mercury-containing thermometers.

Also this week, the heads of the nation's state departments of environmental protection are expected to pass a resolution calling upon the federal government to come up with a plan for long-term storage of mercury by 2003.

It also calls for plans to reduce the use of mercury and to limit its exportation to other countries.

The environmental commissioners are expected to vote on the resolution this week at their annual meeting in Tampa Bay, Fla.