ALBANY – An industry-created voluntary system to recycle toxic mercury from old thermostats is allowing too many to get into the trash and pollute the environment, according to a coalition of environmental groups at the Capitol on April 3.
According to the Albany Times-Union, Sales of the thermostats containing mercury were phased out under state law starting in 2005, but millions remain in use. Hundreds of thousands of thermostats are discarded each year, most in unsafe ways. The solution is a state law requiring mandatory recycling.
The New York Public Interest Group is renewing its efforts for a law after the state Assembly passed a thermostat recycling bill for the last three legislative sessions. A Senate version of the bill passed last year, but differences between the bills were never reconciled.
An old-style thermostat contains a seventh of an ounce of mercury — about 400 times more than an energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulb. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that can harm children and developing fetuses.
A report this month ranked New York 37th in nationwide thermostat recycling, at a rate of about 1 percent. In 2011, New York was estimated to have recycled about 3,400 thermostats (out of 300,000 estimated to have been removed), which was a fraction of the rate of leading states like Vermont and Maine, which have laws that require recycling goals and pay $5 for each thermostat turned in. In Rhode Island, which adopted a recycling law in 2010, the rate jumped 400 percent the following year
A spokesperson for the coalition called the voluntary program “an industry smokescreen” that was masking its ineffectiveness.
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