Cutting down on Mercury

The Cook Islands has joined an international effort to minimize the use of mercury in everyday products.
Vaitoti Tupa, the director of the National Environment Service, was in Chiba, Japan, from January 24-28 to attend the second meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to Prepare a Global Legally Binding Instrument on Mercury.
“The purpose of the meeting was to identify issues of how the world is looking at phasing out mercury chemicals in all products,” said Tupa.
Mercury is a naturally-occurring heavy metal which is used in such items as dental amalgam, thermometers, batteries, antiseptic and antibacterial creams, and skin-lightening creams.
According to a press release from the meeting, “mercury exposure can affect fetal neurological development and has been linked to lowered fertility, brain and nerve damage and heart disease in adults”.
“It’s not an easy job to just tell countries using mercury to ban it, to stop it,” said Tupa. “We’re trying to work out how to minimize it, how we’re going to phase it out. By having a document in place, then we will be sure how we are going to work on these issues.”
Tupa was one of 600 participants at the second meeting. The third meeting will be hosted in October by the African country of Burkina Faso. Two more meetings are scheduled as the participants work toward putting a convention in place.
“There are a lot of issues that need to be looked at,” said Tupa. “You need to look at the financial implications. You need to look at storage. If you have all these banned products, where are we going to store them? Especially with the Pacific, because we can’t store them here in the Pacific. We need to take it someplace else to store it.”
Even though we are a small country, Tupa said mercury is still very much present in the Cook Islands.
“Just look at the dentists and how much mercury is coming in,” he said. “And then look at the products that we’ve been importing. According to the experts, most of the products imported by countries contain mercury.
“Mercury will affect us, through the products that we buy and the food that we eat. Some of the tinned products contain a little bit of mercury inside. It’s in a lot of things we don’t realize.”
The National Environment Service’s presence in Chiba, Tupa said, is another example of how the service is being pro-active when it comes to keeping the country clean and green while ensuring the health of its residents.
“We need to make people aware how serious these chemicals are,” he said.

By John Ireland

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