Reducing Mercury Emissions Like Pulling Teeth

Mercury Jim’s favorite brain-cell destroying heavy metal is showing up in a rather unexpected place: the smokestacks of crematoriums.  The Boston Globe reports that the mercury-laced dental fillings of the dead are vaporized in the furnaces of crematoriums and seep out their smokestacks. The emissions account for only 1 percent of mercury emissions in the U.S., but in England, where everyone wants to go out like a Viking, it seems, burned bodies make up 16 percent of their mercury emissions. In Nevada, 2/3rds of dead people prefer cremation.

Crematoriums can reduce the emissions by putting scrubbers on their smokestacks just like the coal-fired power plants, or by pulling the teeth.

Now there’s an idea. You could use the fillings to make CFL’s!

Hey Kids! Aren’t you glad Santa didn’t leave you any CCW’s: Coal Combustion Wastes?

Each year, power plants in the U.S. collectively
kick out enough of this stuff to fill a train of coal cars stretching
from Manhattan to Los Angeles and back three and a half times. It’s
stored in lagoons next to power plants, buried in old coal mines and
sometimes just piled up in the open. It is the largest waste stream of
most power plants, and a recently released study by the Environmental
Protection Agency found that people exposed to it have a much higher
than average risk of getting cancer. Yet the federal government refuses
to classify the waste as hazardous, and has dragged its feet on
creating any nationally enforceable standards. And with new attention
focused on coal power’s impacts on the air, this great big problem may
get worse, and continue to be ignored. (HCN)

Wow. Just wait til Utahns start sending that stuff to Coal Miner Jim.