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The Bush administration has brokered a pact with the steel and auto industries to remove millions of mercury-containing light switches from vehicles before they are scrapped.
Although foreign automakers stopped using mercury in their cars' lighting systems in 1993, and domestic manufacturers did the same in 2002, about 67.5 million switches are still used in older cars and trucks. Mercury – which is released into the air when recyclers flatten, shred and melt old automobiles into steel – can cause neurological and developmental problems in infants and small children.
Over the next 15 years, the program will reduce the country's annual mercury pollution by at least 5 percent, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Steve Johnson said. Under the pact announced Friday, the steel and auto industries will pay $2 million each to recover 4 million switches over the next three years.
"President Bush and our partners have taken a big step to erase this source of mercury pollution," Johnson said. "It's a pollution-prevention approach."
While U.S. automakers initially resisted paying for the program – Johnson called the two-year negotiation over it "difficult" – other industries involved in the recycling of as many as 12 million autos a year backed the program.
Mark Reiter, vice president of governmental affairs for the Institute of Scrap Recycling, said his trade association's 1,400 members felt strongly about reducing their industry's impact on its surroundings.
"They didn't want to make an environmental problem," Reiter said. "Because mercury is pernicious to kids, people felt very emotional about this. People did not want another Superfund."
Environmental advocacy groups, including the Ecology Center in Michigan and the Environmental Defense in New York, have lobbied state and federal officials to address the problem of mercury switches for five years. Over the past three decades, U.S. automakers have installed more than 200 million mercury switches containing a total of nearly 250 tons of mercury.
Ten states – Maine, New Jersey, Arkansas, Rhode Island, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, Illinois, Iowa and Massachusetts – have adopted programs to remove the switches, which are about the size of a pencil eraser.
"Recovering mercury switches from old cars will remove up to 75 tons of highly toxic mercury from our air and water," Environmental Defense President Fred Krupp said. "Look what can be done where there is the will to achieve real progress and a cooperative approach."
The program will provide participants with a financial incentive to remove the switches, Johnson said, but if it fails to meet its objective, federal officials can regulate mercury emissions from the steel mill furnaces that melt used vehicles.
"We still have that tool in our toolbox," he said.