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Back to Lake Michigan
August 13, 2007

The headline in this morning's Chicago Tribune was "Big polluter to cut mercury." My first thought was that this was a new story about the BP Whiting Refinery since some cynics were calling BP "big polluter."

You may recall in the posting of July 30, there was discussion of BP's ability to release 2 pounds of mercury per year. However the story today is about a chlorine plant in Wisconsin, specifically the ERCO plant in Port Edwards in the middle of the state. This is one of the last five chlorine plants in the U.S. that uses a chlor-alkali process and mercury to turn brine into chlorine. Federal records show that this plant released 1,118 pounds of mercury in 2005. That makes it the 15th largest mercury polluter in the country and certainly the largest in Wisconsin. ERCO is going to close this process and convert to one that does not use mercury.

That's a good thing, but the question becomes, what happens to the 200 tons of the silvery liquid on hand at the plant? Mercury is a commodity, not a hazardous waste, according to the EPA. ERCO can simply sell it, and that seems to be what they have in mind.

There is an organization called Oceana which has bought old mercury to hold it someplace safe to keep it from going on the world market. They have been working on getting ERCO to change its process for a while now.

In any case, a few groups are watching this process, hoping the toxic metal doesn't simply turn up someplace else. As Eric Uram, the founder of Mercury Free Wisconsin said, "...the fear is this mercury could come back to haunt us."

Posted by Peter Welander on August 13, 2007 | Comments (1)