Dumping Toxic Mercury Across America
While claiming that vaccines hurt kids
For the last five years my wife, Marilyn, has worked across the globe to reduce the level of mercury contamination in the developing world. This week, the same administration that claims vaccines damage children announced that coal plants could start dumping mercury— a toxin proven to create birth defects and brain damage in children— right here in America again.
Welcome to the new America, folks. Today, Marilyn tells us what this change means for all of us. Please share it far and wide with anyone you think might be interested, and thank you for the ongoing support!
This week, I was devastated to learn that as part of rolling back dozens of environmental rules, the Trump administration is going to let coal-fired power plants and other industrial polluters return to dumping toxins like mercury, arsenic, and benzene into American air and water. Claiming that this pollution is necessary to address a “national emergency,” the administration has even set up what critics are calling a “polluters’ portal” – an electronic mailbox where companies can quickly and easily request the President’s sign-off to quickly get back to dumping mercury in our air and water. It’s now easier to poison our country with mercury than it is for a senior to get the social security they earned.
As someone who has spent years fighting mercury pollution, this news hits too close to home.
If you’re not very familiar with what mercury is or, for the matter, how dangerous it is, you’re not the only one. The first memory I have of mercury being introduced to me was as a kid. My dad used to have a little jar with a small ball of this sort of liquid-ish metal that we children were forbidden to grab unless dad brought it up and supervised us. It was fun to squeeze it and see it break into even smaller balls and then put it all together again. Why did we have this at home? I honestly couldn’t tell you, but that’s the only memory I have of mercury until later in middle school in chemistry class. We were taught that metallic or elemental mercury — an odorless, shiny, silver-white liquid — is commonly used in thermometers, barometers and fluorescent light bulbs. We were told that metallic mercury is extremely dangerous with a few drops generating enough fumes to contaminate the air in a room and that skin contact with the metal results in the absorption of mercury into the blood stream and potential health problems.
Never again did I hear about mercury usage until I was an adult and had the opportunity to work for the Natural Resources Defense Council under the planetGOLD programme. We work across the globe to eliminate the use of mercury by artisanal and small-scale miners, which has been the largest source of mercury pollution in the world since more advanced countries took measures to reduce mercury contamination.
The reason mercury is used in gold mining is because it has a special characteristic that makes it combine with gold into an amalgam, or combined metal, which helps miners collect fine gold particles from sediment. All around the world these subsistence miners take dirt or sand out of pits and rivers, pour mercury into it, swish it around, and look for clumps of amalgamated gold.
They then take those clumps and burn off the mercury, which leaves behind gold. It’s incredibly toxic and not only extremely dangerous for the miners and their communities, but for all of us.
In the last 5 years I’ve learned about mercury, and it’s hard to overstate how dangerous mercury is for public health. Just to name a few examples, mercury exposure can cause irreversible brain damage, especially in children, and fetuses can suffer life-long harm from exposure in the womb. There is no known safe level of mercury for humans, and even low doses can be hazardous. In fact, the World Health Organization ranks mercury among the top ten chemicals of major public health concern globally. And unlike many pollutants, mercury doesn’t stay put in one place – once released (for example, from a power plant smokestack), it can vaporize and travel far afield, contaminating ecosystems and communities thousands of miles away. This is quite common! As many of the artisanal small-scale operations I mentioned before happen alongside rivers and in areas with wildfires, the mercury they don’t burn off for gold goes into the soil and then when wildfires happen, it still gets released into the atmosphere. Mercury pollution is everyone’s problem, not just a local issue.
Having visited some of these mining communities, I saw miners often handle mercury with bare hands to extract gold, unaware of the poison they and their families are absorbing. There are an estimated 10–20 million people in over 70 countries working as small scale miners – including up to 5 million women and children. Many of these miners show signs of mercury poisoning, and I can tell you, it shows.
All of this makes the EPA’s recent retreat on mercury limits feel like a gut punch. We are bringing this pain back to our country. It’s not just a U.S. regulatory tweak – it’s a massive step backward for America. For my fellow pregnant mothers (I’m at 8 months!) who don’t eat fish because of the mercury, but will now be forced to breath it in.
It’s about the American children who will now be born with birth defects that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. It’s about what this says about our priorities, that our leaders are willing to actively encourage industrialists to convert children’s health and suffering into profit for their shareholders.
The worst part is that mercury doesn’t just disappear once it’s released. Once in the wild it frequently becomes methylmercury – a far more dangerous form of the chemical that accumulates in the food chain. Fish in particular can become heavily contaminated. That mercury then enters the bodies of people who consume it, contributing to all the health problems I mentioned before.
Every step forward we have taken to reduce mercury emissions has been hard-earned. For example, in my experience in the artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector, we’ve worked tirelessly to educate miners, improve their techniques, and introduce alternatives that reduce mercury use. And we’ve seen real results helping transition these subsistence miners to alternatives.
It’s remarkable to me that so many of them have successfully changed their method of mining to reduce mercury pollution—with no expertise, no understanding of the problem, no resources, no alternative income, and living in the most extreme poverty on the planet, yet our fat cat industrialists and shareholders, in supposedly the most innovative and certainly the most resourced country on the planet, are running to daddy begging for a handout because they just can’t figure out how to make money without killing children.
To twist the phrase, this move to expose Americans to mercury again really feels like one step forward, and two steps back.
I’m proud to be part of the crowd, with you, taking the step forward, and hope you’ll continue to support Lucas and me in our work to overcome those who keep pushing us back.
-Marilyn
Thank you both for your public service work providing education, awareness and hope for improving the human experience and that of all life in the planet.
Thank you for your dedication ❤️