How to Dispose of Mercury

I would contact your local fire department (don't use 911 to make the call) or you can call your local or city waste disposal service.

Neither will take the substances, I'll bet, but they will know who you should call to get it properly disposed of.

When I was in Ohio our local county refuge service had a once a month service to bring in just about anything. You had to transport it, but they had a place for just about anything you could imagine.

Re showing the government your mercury --
The people at the municipal recycling centers are often not the brightest stars in the sky. Our county is very environmentally conscious and makes a big deal out of recycling. So one day when I took in a bunch of recyclables including a box of metal that was once a cast magnesium lawnmower frame/blade enclosure. I figured it was a bad idea just to drop it into the aluminum pile due to the way it might burn when the scrap was melted down. (Milo, is that really a problem?)

I tried to tell 4 different guys that the stuff in the box wasn't aluminum, it was magnesium. None had any idea what I was talking about. I'm still sitting on the stuff waiting to make a special trip to the Hazmat disposal place.

Back on the subject of mercury it's my impression that it is pretty valuable stuff and not all that hazardous in the metallic form. Where it gets nasty is when it combines into compounds and gets out into the environment. Where the worry seems to be is in the possibility of it getting loose into the ground and water. I will tell you, though, that once you spill it on a rough floor it breaks up into numerous tiny globules that are almost impossible to clean up with ordinary cleaning processes. (bit of a story behind that)

Ed Weldon

Hello Milo, Hope you are well?

GA to you for a complete answer!

Take care,

Wow. I'd like to see a picture of a bottle of mercury.

When I was in school it was all over the place, but now it is not in vogue.

Of course we had wooden TVs, and fun was riding in the DDT truck fog.

The Sonic Booms of the new jets lost over Arkansas was another thing, and the fallout on Kansas sure didn't cut down on recess.

Selling it is probably good advice.

HAHAHAHAHA, yes I remember the kids running along behind the DDT truck when it would come down the street. I often wonder if any of them are still living. Even as a kid I remember thinking that that probably wasn't such a good idea!

Yes I am one of them and am still doing well, though I have lost some hair

There's been considerable debate on CR4 about the hazards of mercury. This blog entry won't answer your question, but makes for some interesting reading.

Flush it down the commode...

HAHAHAHAHA, leave it to good ol' GUEST to come up with an answer like that...

probably too heavy to flush

hi there.

well, i am in desperate need of mercury.. i am working on bio-sequestration of heavy metals. so, this could be of some use.

You can contact me at prateek.nitdgp@gmail.com

You could use the data from fluorescent lamp making facilities like Sylvania or GE or Philips if they would release it. My guess is that they are not too keen on the idea of sharing this information.

At the fluorescent lamp plant where I worked it was determined that those who consumed a regular diet of beer flushed the mercury out of their body faster than those who did not.

That same company shipped thousands of lbs of mercury out in lamps that had excess mercury (which didn't hurt the lamp) every year until 2000.

Incidentally, mercury is cheap. It sells for about $10 per Kilogram. It is about 13 times as dense as water.

As I was growing up, I had gotten into my dad's prospecting jug of mercury.

I use to lie on my back and pool it in my eyes to freak out my little brother... I'm certain I actually drank some of it. I had no idea what it was.. you know how it is, dumb childhood stuff.

Might explain the fact that I can't wear a wristwatch for more than a month without killing it and can hear music sometimes when there is nothing playing. (My wife hears it too!) I'm not dead or crippled and I doubt if it's really as poisonous as claimed...

Just keep it. What's the problem with keeping it? You never know when you might need to go prospecting and slice a potato, pour in your gold and black sand and mercury and wire the potato with bailing wire or tightly with foil and set it in the campfire. Just don't eat the potatoes (assuming you will have a lot of sand and dustings) after you pull out the gold and dump the rest of it.

JL Mealer

(yes, this will be in my book)

See:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_poisoning

Hi JL Mealer

1. Please take Heavy metal poisoning, spcl mercury. Long term dammage can be hectic.
2. Get chealation / detox treatment ASAP from a heavy metal poison specialist in your area to minimise effects. If you take a few minutes to check the next posting you will understand my concern for you. I realise this happened when you were a kid. Now... any age... try get it out of your system.
3. After each detox, often a few treatments over a couple of months, make sure you boost your blood levels of vital metals with top class nutritional suplements.

When dealing with dangerous subs our light hearted comment may well be applied by the un-informed with real bad consequence.

Companies who disregarded the effects of mercury poisoning have ruined hundreds of lives with breadwinners that suffer the consequences (not pretty at all) and have also done huge dammage to the environment. The fines they pay and awards made against them are never going to make up the damage. FLUSHING DOWN THE COMMODE IS NOT AN OPTION.

Most countries now have strict contol on mercury. Check your State and Fed regs. before you pass it of to anyone.

Mercury has an average half life in the system of 80 days.

However, 8% of inhaled Hg passes through the blood/brain barrier where it has a half life of 29 years.

As Hg damages the nervous system, the symptoms are varied and almost always blamed on something else. It is very difficult to get anyone to believe you have low level Hg poisoning.

Chelation won't remove it from the brain.

I have read that fresh coriander will pull it out of the brain, but have been unable to confirm this. No harm in trying it.

Hg is a dangerous and insidious poison.

The 8% absorption of Hg vapor into the brain assumes that bacteria within the body haven't methylated it.

In that case some 15% is absorbed and has the same 29 year half life in the brain.

These methylating bacteria are found in several places in the body and are the main means for absorption from the gut. (Generally, ingested Hg is poorly absorbed and almost all is excreted.)

Hi Sceptic

Thanks for your input. I certainly am not a guru on Hg, just seen enough to scare me into applying caution when I used in the dental field and for cleaning firearm barrels. Hence also my referral to use a detox specialist.

There are so many toxins we are exposed to in our daily lives, food, work, air, water et al that on their own are usually harmless. It is the combined, compownded effect that can and often I quess does make our lives a misery. Minimising exposure is really all we can and should strive for. If knowingly exposed, even to apparently inconsequential amounts, of toxin the sooner we detox the better.

If most people knew the effects of the "supper herbicides and inseticides" that proliferated the ag market in the 60's and 70's, like "Dieldrin" they would freek out. I watched 250lb WWE build farmers wither away in agony. Don't let me get started on the tobaco industry....my late father grew the trash! I saw what went on those leaves.

Are you taller in the summer than in the winter??

I think it's rather expensive so i would consider selling it if i were you. Call your local chemist (pharmasist, drug store - depending on where you live) and ask. Hell - i would even request quotes first pretending you want to buy some - just to see that i don't get ripped off.

Off-Topic (slight) - I remember when i was a kid i stuch a regular thermomter into a boiling pot of potatoes - just to see what happens without realizing that the thermomter was a personal one that only measures body temp. Obviouolsy the darn thing blew and i was scared to tell my parents i just stuffed the thermometer. I didn't even think of that i ruined dinner as well. Luckily my dad asked where it was just before dinner so i had to fess up. I was in trouble for almost poisoning my whole family.

Mercury is VERY cool. I'm thinking the science department at your local school would be very interested - it's VERY expensive to buy.

I would contact the EPA since Mercury (Me) is a HAZardous MATerial, HAZMAT. The federal EPA wrote and set the standards for ALL the states and thereby all communities in any of those states.

John H.

Clarification.

The Symbol for the chemical element Mercury is Hg not (Me).

Me is a personal pronoun that denotes the first person.

Hg stands for hydrargyrum where hydr- is the prefix denoting liquid and argyrum is the root for silver (argent).

The EPA is not really in the disposal business, they are in the enforcement, citation and fining business. Think carefully as to whether dealing with them will be a positive or negative for you personally and financially before you call. you will lose degrees of freedom to act once you call them.

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle are the three keys of sustainability, and as we said earlier, if you can sell it for reuse that would be the best possible outcome. Others have given good advice about possible recycling outlets as well.

milo

_{(Oops! The symbol for mercury is 'Hg')}

If you are anywhere near upstate NY I will take it off your hands.

Your state DEP office will help you

Looks like you have had enough response options from "the crew"

Contact your local university's (go on there website and look for any research labs) and start asking people if they can dispose of it, chances are you'll find someone who needs it or can put you in touch of someone who does. If your in Ontario, Canada let me know and I have a guy who disposes of it for free. Last I checked Hg was only worth about 5 cents a pound, and you would have to hand deliver it as no shipping company will ship it without you paying a Haz Material fee and that would far outway the money you would make off of it.

I as well remember playing with it at school, and once remember breaking a thermometer in my mouth when I was young and knew that it was a very bad thing to happen at the time, I spit it and the glass out and rinsed out my mouth. For weeks I thought I was going to become a Mad hatter! LOL

The term "Mad Hatter" was a condition stemming from use of Mercury in the use of making Beaver Pelt hats in the 1800's. Basically the workers would go crazy. This was the basic explanation given to me as a kid from my Dad.

Here, I just looked it up. http://www.naturalnews.com/016544.html

http://corrosion-doctors.org/Elements-Toxic/Mercury-mad-hatter.htm

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1897/what-caused-the-mad-hatter-to-go-mad

This is a good read!

http://ca.encarta.msn.com/column_sciencemercury/of_mercury_and_mad_hatters.html

I wonder how much your "jug" holds.

Mercury has recieved a bad rap in recent years but it is a very important metal in industry.

Rather than think of it in terms of "disposal" think of it in terns as a metal with value.

All neon shops use small amounts of mercury on a daily basis. I can remember my father, who built the first neon sign south of St Louis in 1923, searching for mercury during WWII and " cleaning it with nitric acid before using it.

Donate it to a college chemistry department.

Yeah rcapper...the really ironic thing is that DDT turned out to be SAFE!

So many things are safe 'enough' when handled correctly, or their danger is relative to other alternatives. The whole scare/crisis/change scam is so easily used along with a gullible and lazy network media. Some perfectly useful and efficient solutions or materials are simply demonized by those with a political or other agenda, playing up deceptive descriptions or biased anecdotal stories for the media-imbibing public for whatever cynical reasons.

See the brain-dead-stupid claims that CO2 is now suddenly "bad for the environment" for just one example. Oh - and the ridiculous followup that man-made CO2 now magically "causes" the global warming cycle that stopped a decade ago.

Mercury vapor is dangerous and highly toxic...Mercury as a liquid metal is "relatively" safe. We used to pour it from one hand to the other, play with it on the chem-lab desk, made little paths for it like those Rube-Goldberg arrangements with the marbles and such. So, for your Mercury, follow any of the good reuse suggestions - lots of schools, companies, and recycling centers will pay you a little for it to cover your gas to get it to them. It's still worth it to not dump it, just keep it in a sealed container until you pass it along.

DDT, on the other hand, is one of the safest of all the nearly-natural pesticides, even if you drink it like water. Most of the alternatives over the last 50 years have now been removed from the market due to discovery of much more destructive side effects, compared to the safety of DDT use.

Some issues remains at least interesting - it's cheap and easy for any company to make, it takes awhile to work, it has a long persistance when it gets below soil (breaks up quickly in sunlight), and takes a couple weeks to wash safely off of vegetables before market. So...is that always bad thing? Even though it does NOT thin bird eggs after all, and is not a danger to much of anything short-term except for bugs, there really never were any long-term studies showing ANY negative results that didn't turn out to have been biased (intentionally or not). Only excessive overuse seems to be a problem...but when is that ever not a problem for much of anything useful? Oh, and did I mention it's cheap to make?

Turns out it may even be a valid treatment against cancer, rather than the unsubstantiated claims that it might cause it.

Oh well.

Could've saved a few HUNDREDS of millions of lives, throughout Africa and the world. But WTH, the UN population-control crowd would have had to feed them, and then where would we be?

Not that I'm claiming that costing millions and millions of human lives was anything more than an unfortunate unintended consequence. I'm typically more interested in "follow the money."

Can you think of any other reason why we should enforce a GOVERNMENT BAN on the ubiquitous and cheap light bulb...in favor of a much more expensive compact flourescent lamp and ballast assembly subject to lots of patents, filled with toxic Mercury gas vapors when hot, and costing/profiting much more to make and purchase?

Admittedly, it's a great idea for life-cycle considerations, but shouldn't the consumers in the market be making those decisions in a "free" country?
<sigh> they'll soon be replaced by government mandates to use LED's anyway...

Dear Guest,

Mercury-in-glass thermometer manufacturers (Small or Medium size industry) could probably welcome your jugful. Some chemical/Drug manufacturers could also use the stuff.Others like manufacturers of Barometers may also be contacted.Hope this helps.

Regards,

D.Ramakrishna Naidu

Hello Guest,

Just a thought, but, if you are near a University I would think they may well be interested in tacking your Mercury?

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