Crafting Invincible Environmental Protections, Part 2

Pollution: A Way of Life

(Listen to the radio version here.)

This is me and my Grandpa the day I graduated from high school in 1969, on my front porch in Northlake, Illinois. I was first in my class of about 450 (I am not making this up!), but didn’t have a clue about anything with regard to the environment. I’d never even heard of a chickadee—I thought that was just a silly W.C. Fields kind of word.

One of the autumn rituals in my town when I was growing up was raking leaves into big piles next to the street and burning them. The smoky air irritated my eyes, but no more than my parents’ cigarettes, and I liked the fragrance of burning leaves except when people were burning trash with them, which people often did.

When anyone got a cut or scratch back then, we coated it with Mercurochrome. Mercury was known to kill germs, so how could it be bad? Mercurochrome is no longer sold in the U.S. or most other developed countries, but it’s still available in poor countries.

Fever thermometers were made of glass. When they inevitably fell on the floor and shattered, we of course collected the tiny balls of mercury rolling on the floor, either throwing them in the trash or washing them down the drain. But we seldom resisted the temptation to play with them first, these shiny, jiggly rolling drops, obviously liquid yet never flattening like water.

One day after school, after I had cleaned the blackboard, my teacher called me over to her desk. She was playing with a blob of what she called “quicksilver,” maybe an inch and a half in diameter, rolling it around in a round glass container she called a “Petri dish.” We were both mesmerized by how the silvery ball wiggled about, the bottom remaining flat as it glided from there to there, breaking into smaller balls when it hit the side. When the little balls touched, they instantly reformed into bigger balls like magic. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen!

Then we took turns poking the ball with our index fingers. It didn’t feel like anything at all, as if we were touching thin air. We each poured a marble-sized ball into the palm of our hand and rolled it around and poked it with our fingertips—this was so fun! When I asked how big the thermometer was that gave her so much, she said it didn’t come from a thermometer—she’d bought it at either the local hardware store or hobby shop, but now I can’t remember which.

When I got home, my fingertips were still silvery, and I probably got some on my books and lunchbox. Handwashing was not part of our family culture, and being an incurable nail-biter, I’m guessing I ingested an unhealthy amount of mercury that day as well as the many times I played with the mercury from broken thermometers.

Surprisingly but fortunately, elemental mercury isn’t very toxic on its own, but it becomes extremely dangerous when washed down the drain or thrown in the garbage or burned in an incinerator, because all kinds of natural processes convert it to the much more lethal methylmercury.

All the dental fillings Russ and I got as kids were mercury amalgam, as were dental fillings for everyone else. Sometimes scientists used to ask Russ to spit into a test tube so they could ensure that their equipment was detecting mercury, which was reliably present in detectable amounts in his saliva from his old fillings. That was sobering enough that Russ made sure any fillings our kids got were composite resin. He got into a few arguments with my former brother-in-law, a dentist, who insisted, along with the American Dental Association, FDA, and EPA, that mercury amalgam fillings are perfectly safe for most patients.

It's certainly true that, like the elemental mercury I played with as a child, the mercury in fillings isn’t lethal for the patient, though it’s dangerous enough that in 2020, the FDA guidelines were amended to recommend against amalgam for high-risk groups including children, pregnant and nursing women, and people with neurological disease, impaired kidney function, or known sensitivity to mercury. Removing and replacing an amalgam filling involves breaking it away from the tooth, significantly raising the mercury levels in blood and urine for a short time, so once a filling is there, it’s safer to leave it in place until the tooth needs more work. Russ and I still have some of that tell-tale metal in our mouths.

The much larger problem with mercury amalgam fillings is environmental. Dental offices used to dispose of amalgam waste down the drain even though sewage treatment plants are not designed to treat or recycle mercury or other heavy metals. Dental amalgam is the largest source of mercury received by U.S. water treatment plants, but it wasn’t until 2017 that EPA effluent guidelines required dental offices to use an amalgam separator in their drainage systems. Last I talked to him, at least one dentist (not my own!) was still griping about that expense and snarling about “government regulation.”

When people with mercury amalgam fillings die and are cremated, all the mercury is vaporized, literally going up in smoke. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, it is estimated that globally about 3.6 metric tons of mercury vapor was emitted into the world’s air through cremation in 2010 alone. I intend to be cremated at some point in the murky future, but have instructions to get my teeth with amalgam fillings pulled out first. That mercury belongs at our hazardous waste facility, not in the air my grandson breathes.

My little brother Mike was born in December 1955, the same calendar year as my sister. He was very premature, weighing less than 4 pounds, and was in the hospital for two or three months, coming home just in time to catch chicken pox from the rest of us. Being so premature put him developmentally behind his birth-age, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, the lead paint on our windowsills and woodwork was peeling. I’m sure he ingested a lot of lead because I remember his regular routine of pulling himself up to stand at the window and mouthing the windowsill. I was a preschooler myself when I saw him eat a couple of potato chip-sized paint chips and yelled to my mom for help, but she said she’d just washed the windows so the paint was perfectly clean. No big deal. Our Catholic school accepted Mike into first grade with my sister, his “Irish twin,” when he was still just five years old, setting him up for failure from the start. It’s small wonder that of the five of us, he’s the one who turned to drugs, didn’t graduate from high school, and couldn’t pass the literacy tests to enlist in the military. It obviously wasn’t just the lead paint, but that sure didn’t help. According to Google, most pipes in houses built in 1950 had galvanized steel pipes, but city water lines to houses were still lead.

Asbestos products were everywhere in the 50s and 60s, from ironing board covers and oven mitts to “extra absorbent” kitchen towels. Hairdryers released asbestos into the air just about every time they were turned on. Exposure to loose asbestos fibers is extremely dangerous, and one popular product was essentially nothing but that. Christmas tree “flocking” put a coat of what looked like newly-fallen snow on indoor Christmas trees! Imagine that! Fortunately for us, my family couldn’t afford to flock our tree, though I remember my sister being jealous of a friend whose Christmas tree was flocked. Mary spent a lot of time at her house.

My family bought insecticide sprays for indoors, but we didn’t buy any lawn chemicals. We kids pulled some of the dandelions, left any fertilizing to our dog, and trusted the DDT truck to take care of the bugs. It was upper middle class families who could afford the chemicals to make their lawns pristine.

I don’t know if people of younger generations can begin to fathom how many hazardous chemicals were part of everyday life here in America during the very era that people wearing red hats seem to be nostalgic for, even as they, too, must notice all those commercials for legal services for victims of mesothelioma.

Like the children in Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, even as far back as the 60s and certainly by the 70s, more and more people were starting to realize that so much post-war fun had left us with a mess that was

so big
And so deep and so tall,
We [could] not pick it up.
There [was] no way at all!

In the children’s story, the Cat returns and magically cleans up the mess, but in real life, no one person could possibly solve even a single component of the toxic soup we’d created, much less all of it. Could there possibly be a solution that was big and deep and tall enough to do the job when the problems were so complex and woven into the very fabric of American life? The teams of scientists, policy experts, and members of Congress and their aides putting together the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts did their part. But would we Americans—human and corporate—do ours?