are facing a possibility of an ice age on this globe because of the pollution of the air. Dr. Federov made an estimate this could happen within 50 to 100 years and the American environmental experts thought he was a little bit conservative on his estimates.

We have been charged in this country frequently in the international realm of politics of putting our economic interests ahead of human values. It just seems to me that with the kind of leadership required to deal with environmental problems from a global perspective that we are really not taking the lead or the initiative we should be taking in such sections as 211. Even if you did put the word "may" in on line 22, it would certainly have indicated a little more concern than when it says, "The administrator finds that as exported and used the substance will produce." "Will produce," it seems to me, opens ourselves to the charge that we are really only interested in protecting our economic interest. We are sacrificing the environmental values here that we are trying to protect within our own country, but little concern is shown as it relates to other countries.

I have heard this reference to inhibiting the foreign trade possibilities and so forth, but I really feel in light of this other evidence that this is a rather weak argument. Is the administration frozen into this position? If we could come up with some wording that would apply the same standards to exports that we demand of our own domestic markets would the administration be receptive to such language?

Mr. TRAIN. Let me make two comments. One, I suppose this is argumentative, I do feel that our Government is taking a lead internationally on environmental matters. I do not think there is any question about it. I think the position of the administration and the bipartisan record of this Congress on environmental matters has been widely acclaimed around the world. So I would differ with you just on that very general point. I think we are taking a strong international

Senator HATFIELD. Let me interrupt, I do not want the record to indicate or imply that I felt we were not taking a role of leadership. I simply feel we should be strengthening that leadership in every way. To me, this type of thing gives us another vehicle through which to strengthen that leadership.

Mr. TRAIN. I think you and I fully agree on that general point. I think we should be continually strengthening our role of international leadership in this area. I think I can readily say we are not frozen into this provision. I think that has really been a fairly standard provision, and it probably is included in this legislation pretty much because it has been included in the past, and I do not think it has been the subject of any special reexamination in the light of this particular legislation.

There are, as you know, a wide variety of environmental controls involving products such as automobiles which we apply in this country and which are not applied to exports, and there are substantial questions involved in determining whether we should or should not apply these standards. Not only are you imposing a standard which may not be necessary in some foreign country but you are also at the same time probably raising the price of the product to the foreign consumer, perhaps unnecessarily.

So there are questions I think that would have to be examined, and I would say simply in response we are not frozen in, we would be very happy within the administration to take a hard look at this whole question.

Senator HATFIELD. I appreciate your response, because the United States today is responsible for about 40 percent of the industrial pollution and the ocean is becoming a great conveyor of pollution. It no longer can be restricted just to national boundaries or national concerns, because of the international character of the air and the atmosphere. I think we must give strong leadership to advancing the global character and perspective of correcting these environmental problems. We just cannot look at these purely from a domestic or a national point of view, and especially as we are looked to in so many fields to give world leadership.

I think one of the things we are going to find difficult at the Stockholm meeting will be just on this very point: whether or not we are concerned about the world and the global problems here or are we just really advancing our economic interest by producing products that are not meeting the same standards for the world market that we require for our domestic market.

I would like to see us go to Stockholm with a good record within our own country, and a very definite program for the global aspects of this environmental issue. It just seems to me that if you are open to that, I would like to develop, with the chairman's permission, some language here that would give the same standard in effect to what we export as we require for our domestic market. I believe inhibiting the trade relationships really is not that important.

This may be a judgmental factor. But it seems to me that if we can produce a superior product, especially as the world becomes more conscious of environmental problems, that we will have a preference to our products issued by the buyers in the world market as they know our efforts are toward this objective.

Mr. TRAIN. I think there is a very real opportunity for American business in terms of the development of new export markets to take advantage of our environmental technology and knowhow. I think that more important than the trade aspects, which I did mention, is the question of imposing our standards upon other peoples. It is not a black and white question.

You are familiar with the issue over DDT exports. We have substantially reduced the amount of DDT used in the United States to a very small fraction of what it used to be, and yet at the same time there are those areas of the world, typically those that have major malaria problems, endemic malaria problems, that insist that they must have DDT. Without arguing the merits or demerits of that particular question, I simply cite it as an example of the two sides of the coin here that must be dealt with. The issue is not an open-and-shut one by any stretch of the imagination.

Senator HATFIELD. I appreciate that. I appreciate your response. But I would only say we cannot follow that to its ultimate conclusion, because that is the same argument we would get in the arms field, that after all, if we do not peddle arms in a certain country, they will buy it from somewhere else. Therefore, we get into this question here as to just exactly what we should or should not export.

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Mr. TRAIN. But we do not have malaria in this country to any sig nificant degree, so we can afford to be rather pure on this.

Senator HATFIELD. We can afford to be concerned about environmental problems because we have reached a certain standard of living which the undeveloped and the underdeveloped countries have not, who say we cannot be concerned with environmental problems until we reach your standard. Here again we must take leadership, and I think the leadership role sometimes is a sacrificing one, but which must be done if objectivity and the morality of it is on its side.

Senator SPONG. Mr. Train, we have a rollcall vote now, and I suppose this is a good time to cease our examination of you. We appreciate your appearance here this morning. There may be some followup questions that I will submit later in the hearings. We thank you very much for being here.

Senator Hatfield, you had no further questions?

Senator HATFIELD. No.

Senator SPONG. The committee will recess for 15 minutes while we vote. We will be back and resume then.

(Recess.)

Senator SPONG. The hearings will come to order.

The next witness will be Dr. David Klein.

Dr. Klein, you were kind enough to testify before this subcommittee last year and we are very pleased to have you back with us this morning.

STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID KLEIN, PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY, HOPE COLLEGE, HOLLAND, MICH.

Dr. KLEIN. Thank you for the opportunity to present some views and some data which I think will lend support to the legislation under

consideration.

Before I start my prepared statement, listening to the prior discussion on the question of exports puts me in mind of a couple of specific instances which occurred during the great mercury controversy, and which I think may have some bearing on that general topic of whether we should or should not export things which we find bad.

Sweden, as you know, experienced difficulty with their wildlife as a result of alkylmercurials used in agriculture, and they began to restrict the use of those alkylmecurials in their agriculture in about 1966. Now, what they did with the materials which they could not use was to sell them to us and we just went along, apparently completely unaware that these things have bad effects, bought them and used them here. So we have been ourselves on the short end of that particular stick.

A similar incident on the export of technology occurred in connection with one of the Japanese factories involved in the Japanese environmental mercury poisonings. One of those factories exported its whole process to Italy, the process which involved discharging mercury from the production of acetaldehyde. They exported that process to Italy and apparently made no mention to the Italians that they had experienced some problems with their waste discharge. I think in neither of those cases did the economic interests in Japan or Sweden come off looking very good in the eyes of the world.

On the other side of the coin, Canada refuses to export fish which they find unsuitable for their own consumption. They will not ship out things that they do not think are suitable for themselves.

So there are I suppose precedents on both sides, but I do believe that Canada looks a little better than Sweden and Japan.

With that much preface I will begin with my prepared statement. I think with your permission I will omit the first two paragraphs, because as I read them over they are not too interesting. The essence, though, of that message is that I believe what we need is a combined approach in which we first develop improved waste treatment, and second, we limit the quantities of material which enter the treatment process.

The degree of waste treatment required to get satisfactory removal of toxic materials is very difficult to attain and the problem can be improved immeasurably if it is possible to initially limit the quantity of wastes that will enter the treatment plant.

Senator SPONG. Regardless of interest, we will receive your statement in its entirety, and you can testify as you will from it.

Dr. KLEIN. Fine.

Existing laws have tended to concentrate largely on industrial discharges and on a few specific major pollutants. However, a wide variety of products containing potential environmental pollutants reach individual consumers and are disposed of by them, and such disposal is very largely unregulated. I will confine my specific remarks to mercury, for which I have data, but we recognize the problem is of course not confined to mercury.

At the time this subcommittee had hearings last spring and summer on the effects of mercury on man and the environment, the major source of waste mercury to the environment was the chlor-alkali industry, which was losing mercury to air and water at the rate of 500 tons per year, about four-tenths of a pound per ton of chlorine produced. The most recent figures I have seen indicate that this loss has been cut to about two hundredths of a pound per ton, a twentieth of the former rate of loss. Direct discharge of mercury to the waters is now measured in pounds per day rather than thousands of pounds per day.

The second large use of mercury is in electrical products and about 500 tons is used annually in making batteries. How is this 500 tons of mercury thrown away when the batteries are burned out? Most probably goes to dumps or landfills where the cases eventually corrode away and the mercury is released to contaminate the groundwater.

Some of the batteries are burned, and their mercury is added to the atmospheric burden. The annual disposal of 500 tons of mercury by the chlor-alkali industry has been controlled; the annual disposal of 500 tons of mercury by consumers of mercury batteries has not been controlled. Surely mercury batteries are very fine gadgets, and everyone should have some. Their use presents minimal health or environmental hazard, but their disposal does. We need leadership in developing reclamation procedures for these products, and we need regulations preventing careless disposal.

Most other uses of mercury are small, involving tens or at most a few hundred tons, and t strial discharges associated with these uses are already subjec

tion. Howe significant fraction

of this mercury ends up in consumer products, to be thrown away by the consumer. I have in the past estimated that 200 to 300 tons of mercury are discharged into the environment each year through disposal of consumer goods, roughly half to the atmosphere and half to the waters. This estimate was based on tabulations of the uses of mercury, and indicate that a city of a million people would annually discharge into its sewers about 1,000 pounds of mercury. This mercury is in part removed by the sewage treatment plant, and the balance is discharged with the liquid effluent into some water body. I have since made a few measurements to check that estimate, and I am happy to say that estimate came out very close. The Holland, Mich., treatment plant serves about 30,000 people and handles only domestic wastes. There are no industrial discharges at all into that plant. Over a 10-day period last month, mercury entered the plant at an average rate of 27 grams per day, or 22 pounds per year. If we extrapolate that to pounds per year to million population, that could come out 750 pounds per year per million.

The Grand Rapids, Mich., treatment plant serves about a quarter of a million people, and handles both domestic and industrial wastes. Over the same period, mercury entered this plant at a rate of 360 grams per day, or 290 pounds per year. This would correspond to 1,100 pounds per year per million population. Significantly, in the case of Grand Rapids, the rate of discharge was highest on the weekend, when industrial activity is at a minimum.

In both these plants treatment of the effluent removed on the average only about one-quarter of the mercury. The balance was discharged to rivers. The Lake Michigan water which enters these cities contains mercury at a concentration of about 0.02 part per billion, so the entering waters contain less than half a pound of mercury per year for Holland and less than 2 pounds for Grand Rapids.

The great bulk of the mercury discharge was in fact added to the water system in its passage through the city.

I have found also some data on the city of Stockholm where some 600,000 people discharged 750 pounds of mercury per year. This would correspond to about 1,250 pounds per year per million population. So as a rough but fairly solid estimate, I think that it is safe to say that on the average a city of a million will discharge to its sewers about a thousand pounds of mercury per year.

The results indicate that the earlier estimate was close, and that nonmanufacturing uses of mercury do lead to significant discharges. Where does this mercury come from? Hospital and college laboratories are a source. If we extrapolate some data available from Sweden and from Canada we will conclude that some 40 tons of mercury annually enters the U.S. environment through breaking clinical thermometers in hospitals, so I suppose we need nurses with stickier fingers when they shake those down. Possibly half of that enters the waters. In dental offices a fairly large portion of the amalgam which the dentist makes out does not end up in the teeth but is disposed of in other ways.

Mercury-containing pharmaceuticals are a source. Paint brushes and paint rags are washed out, and this is a source. In a recent report to the Michigan House of Representatives Dr. Frank M. D'ltri of Michigan State University listed some of the many uses of mercury. He

states: