Mercury and especially the phenylmercurials have been used as preservatives or fungistats in consumer and industrial products such as floor waxes, furniture polishes, fabric softeners, air conditioner filters, toothbrushes, mattress inner components, cellulose sponges, rope, canvas, drywall products, wall plaster, adhesives, scatter rugs, brooms, furniture polishing rags, dust mops, and a variety of dust control preparations. And mercury is commonly used as an antimicrobial agent in many consumer products manufactured with plastics, rubber, leather and textile components.

We have also analyzed a few of the products listed by D'ltri. All contain mercury in small amounts ranging from 0.3 parts per million for a cellulose sponge and a floor wax, 0.1 parts per million in some fabric softeners. The total mercury contained in all the cellulose sponges in the country must be very small, but when added to the mercury in floor wax and fabric softeners, in pharmaceuticals and paints, the total quantity becomes large, and this total is collected from all over the city, combined and discharged at a point into a water body. Mercury in these consumer products is of course quite dilute when discharged, the concentrations typically being a few parts per billion. In an earlier study involving sewage outfalls discharging into the ocean I observed that the sediments around these outfalls do concentrate the mercury by as much as a factor of 20 to 50 over the sediments at some distance from the outfall, and further that the organisms living in such sediments do show higher body burdens of mercury. In other words, mercury acts like mercury, regardless of the source and concentration.

If my data can be extended to the country, then the daily discharge of water by our sewage system is about 600 pounds per day, a total of nearly 200,000 pounds per year. To look at a more specific case, because it is in an area which is in trouble, the Detroit area, with a population of roughly 3 million, would annually discharge about 3,000 pounds of mercury into the troubled waters of the Midwest; this is about 8 pounds per day. A chlor-alkali plant with this discharge would be shut down quickly under the 1899 Refuse Act, but the mercury coming from the sewage outfalls is exempted from action under this

act.

Much of what I have said about mercury is true, at least in a general way, of other environmental hazards. They occur in small amounts in a wide variety of consumer goods, the quantity in each class of consumer goods is quite small, but the total quantity, when collected, combined, and discharged, may be very large.

We need to extend our efforts in environmental protection to include those goods not now regulated. We need to evaluate new chemical products and to reevaluate old ones, to find out whether or when they endanger the environment. Environmentally hazardous substances should not be used unless there is no substitute. If there is no substitute, then the disposal of these substances must be regulated and the total quantity in circulation must be limited.

Senator SPONG. Thank you.

Doctor, if I understood your statement correctly, there are probably something like 600 pounds of mercury per day presently being discharged directly into our waters from municipal sewage plants. Dr. KLEIN. That is the way it looks, yes.

Senator SPONG. Not only is that fact disheartening in and of itself, but it is especially so when pitted against the Interior Department's

release of last summer entitled "Secretary Hickel Reports Mercury Discharges Reduced by 86 Percent."

Now that release told us that mercury discharges from industrial sources had been reduced from 287 pounds per day in July to 40 pounds per day in September. I remember being very comforted by that, but when you crank that 600 pounds per day into the equation, isn't it the case that the reduction referred to represented only about 25 percent of the total direct discharges from industrial and municipal sources! Becoming excited about that kind of a reduction is sort of like becoming excited about getting rid of the flu when you still have tuberculosis or cancer. We have been speaking of direct discharges into our water. What would you say is the total daily discharge into the environment?

Dr. KLEIN. It is roughly double the figure I gave you before, perhaps a little more. I can give you that probably somewhat more accurately. I am stuck on total daily discharge. It can give you a rough tonnage figure which would correspond at present to about 1,000 tons per year. What we would need to do to get daily poundage figures is divide by 365 and multiply by 2,000 which I am not capable of doing at this time.

But it is roughly a thousand tons per year as the total discharge of mercury which has been somehow dug up, mined, put into products, and then dispersed, in the order of a thousand tons per year.

Senator SPONG. While I am questioning you I will see if I can get the mathematics worked out over here on my left.

I am told that works out to about 5,500 pounds per day. Does that sound right?

Dr. KLEIN. I can believe that.

Senator SPONG. You will accept that?

Dr. KLEIN. Sure.

There was a lot of fine print in that release about the decrease in the mercury discharges that not everybody read.

Senator SPONG. In your statement you mention some sources of mercury that might be responsible for the levels of discharge you have found. Are there substitutes for mercury in these products, or is it absolutely essential that these uses of mercury continue?

.

Dr. KLEIN. In most cases there are substitutes, at least for a lot of the use. For example, in paints, mercury is used largely to increase the shelf life, to some extent to prevent the material from mildewing once it is on the wall. There are substitute materials which I think are adequate in all but a few cases, the few cases being light-colored exterior water-based paints for use in very humid regions. So it might, for example, be possible to continue the use of mercurial preservatives in those paints and restrict it in other paints. That is true, I think, of most

sources.

I do believe that loss from thermometers could be cut down significantly by making the thermometers a little sturdier or by causing the nurses not to stand near the edge of the table when shaking them down. There is now no safe method for disposing of that mercury, but that material need not enter the water.

The same is true from the materials lost in dentistry. That material need not enter the water.

If there could be defined some mechanism by which the stuff could be shipped away somewhere and be recycled, then it need not enter the water. The same is true with mercury batteries. Given a mechanism for disposal, it could be kept away from the environment effectively.

I believe, just looking at the list of uses, without severely hurting anything except the miners, we could cut our losses down to about a third of the present level without doing anything very different from what we are doing now.

Senator SPONG. In your statement you mention that the Refuse Act of 1899 does not apply to sewage outfalls. Even if the Refuse Act, or the Federal Water Pollution Control Act for that matter, could be used to control discharges of this type, I wonder if this would solve the problem. I am told that the technology does not now exist to remove substances like mercury from municipal waste on a practical basis. In the absence of adequate treatment facilities it likewise seems a practical impossibility for a city to tell its individual homeowners that they cannot discharge mercury-containing sewage into municipal plants.

It appears to me that the only practical way to deal with this problem at this time is to control mercury at the source by banning or limiting the production of mercury-containing products. Do you agree?

Dr. KLEIN. I agree completely, yes. We really need more technology in the final end of this system, in the final disposal at the sewage plant, and that technology seems not available.

Senator SPONG. Do you see this bill as a means for instituting such control?

Dr. KLEIN. For instituting control of mercury at the source?
Senator SPONG. Yes.

Dr. KLEIN. Well, I have read both the bill and the amendment. Mercury and mercurials, of course, are existing chemicals. I assume, however, they present a sufficient hazard that they would be covered under either the original bill or the amendment. Certainly I think either of these bills would go a long way in controlling the quantities of mercury and of other heavy metals which are now released uncontrolled into the environment.

Senator SPONG. The legislation would not be very effective if it did not take cognizance of the present perils presented by mercury. Dr. KLEIN. Right.

Senator SPONG. It is the intent of the amendment to S. 1478 that most final consumer products would be exempted from the testing requirements if the components of that product have been tested individually. However, the Administrator of EPA would have the authority to require testing on the final product as well, presumably if there is reason to believe that the components may act differently together than they do individually.

Do you think this option is necessary?

Dr. KLEIN. Yes, I do. As a matter of fact, if I had been writing the law that is just what I would have said.

Senator SPONG. Can you give us some indication of the degree to which components of a product may be innocuous individually but may present hazards if found together as a product?

Dr. KLEIN. Some indication of the degree? I am sorry to say nothing comes to mind. Nothing comes to mind that I know of.

Senator SPONG. Doctor, we appreciate very much your appearance this morning. Thank you for your testimony.

We will be in recess until 10 o'clock tomorrow morning in this room. (The statement follows:)

STATEMENT OF DAVID H. KLEIN, PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY, HOPE COLLEGE,

HOLLAND, MICH.

Our society and its technology have brought us into a very peculiar relationship with our environment. We have developed a huge, and increasing, body of products and processes which are used by consumers and thrown away by consumers, but we have just begun to learn how to throw them away without threat to our health or our environment. We have tended to act in the belief that the world is flat and that a waste product, once throw away, will drift to the edge of the world and fall off into space, never to reappear.

We are, however, beginning to believe that the world is round, and that throwing something away does not make it disappear. The tons of unburned hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen, and lead thrown away from our automobiles will be controlled, partly by improved waste treatment at the point of discharge, and partly by eliminating from the fuel the non-essential additives. The discharge of tons of phosphates, which has increased the rate of eutrophication of many of our waters, will be controlled by limiting the phosphates entering the treatment plant, and by improved waste treatment. This general approach of better treatment of discharge streams coupled with limitation of the total quantity of pollutants entering the treatment system, offers great promise for the preservation, and perhaps eventual reclamation, of the environment.

Existing laws have tended to concentrate largely on industrial discharges and on a few specific major pollutants. A wide variety of products containing potential environmental pollutants reach individual consumers and are disposed of by them, and such disposal is largely unregulated. I will confine my specific remarks to mercury, for which I have data, but 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 chloralkali 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. Direct discharge of mercury to the waters has been cut even further, and is now measured in pounds per day rather than thousands of pounds per day.

The second largest 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 chloralkali 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 the industrial discharges associated with these uses are already subject to regulation. However, a significant fraction of this mercury ends up in consumer products, to be thrown away by the consumer. I have in the past estimated that two to three hundred tons of mercury are discharged into the environment each year through disposal of consumer goods, about half to the atmosphere and half to the waters. This estimate was based on tabulations of the uses of mercury, and also indicated that a city of a million people would annually discharge into its sewers about 1000 pounds of mercury. This mercury is in part removed by the sewage treatment plant, and the balance is discharged into some water body.

I have since made a few measurements, to check the estimate. The Holland, Michigan treatment plant serves about 30,000 people and handles only domestic wastes. Over a ten-day period last month, mercury entered the plant at an average rate of 27 grams per day, or 22 pounds per year. This would correspond to 750 pounds per year per million population. The Grand Rapids, Michigan 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 1100 pounds per year per million population. Significantly, the rate of discharge was highest on the weekend when industrial activity is at a minimum. Treatment of the influent 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 ppb, 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 results indicate that the earlier estimate was close, and that non-manufacturing uses of mercury do lead to significant discharges. Where does this mercury come from? Hospital and college laboratories are a source. Mercurycontaining 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:

“... mercury and especially the phenylmercurials have been used as preservatives or fungistats in consumer and industrial products such as floor waxes, furniture polishes, fabric softeners, air conditioner filters, toothbrushes, mattress inner components, cellulose sponges, rope, canvas, drywall products, wall plaster, adhesives, scatter rugs, brooms, furniture polishing rags, dust mops, and a variety of dust control preparations. And mercury is commonly used as an antimicrobial agent in many consumer products manufactured with plastics, rubber, leather, and textile components."

We have analyzed a few of the products listed by D'ltri. All contain mercury in small amounts ranging from 0.3 ppm for a cellulose sponge and a floor wax, to 0.1 ppm in some fabric softeners. The total mercury contained in all the cellulose sponges in the country must be very small, but when added to the mercury in floor wax and fabric softeners, in pharmaceuticals and paints, the total becomes large, and this total is collected from all over the city, combined, and discharged at a point into a water body.

Mercury in these consumer products is of course, quite dilute when discharged, the concentrations being a few parts per billion. In an earlier study involving sewage outfalls discharging into the ocean, I found that the sediments around these outfalls do concentrate the mercury, and the organisms living in such sediments do show higher body burdens of mercury. In other words, mercury acts like mercury, regardless of the source and concentration.

If my data for western Michigan can be extended, then the Detroit area with a population of about three million, annually discharges about 3000 pounds of mercury into the troubled waters of the Midwest; This is about 8 pounds per day. A chlor-alkali plant with this discharge would be shut down quickly under the 1899 Refuse Act, but the mercury coming from the sewage outfalls is specifically exempted from action under this act.

Much of what I have said about mercury is true, at least in a general way, of other environmental hazards. They occur in small amounts in a wide variety of consumer goods, the quantity in each class of consumer goods is quite small, but the total quantity, when collected, combined, and discharged, may be very large.

We need to extend our efforts in environmental protection to include those goods not now regulated. We need to evaluate new chemical products, and to re-evaluate old ones, to find out whether, or when, they endanger the environment. Environmentally hazardous substances should not be used unless there is no substitute. If there is no substitute, then the disposal of these substances must be regulated, and the total quantity in circulation must be limited.

(Whereupon, at 11:15 a.m., the hearing was recessed, to reconvene at 10 a.m., Wednesday, August 4, 1971.)

(The following information was subsequently received for the record :)