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Neil: This is Living Planet, I’m Neil King. This week signatories of a global agreement on curbing mercury pollution known as the Minamata Convention are meeting in Switzerland to address worldwide concerns on this powerful pollutant.
So, I’ve asked Living Planet’s Kathleen Schuster to join me in the studio to talk about some of her research into mercury pollution.
Neil: Hi Kathleen.
Kathleen: Hey Neil.
Neil: So when people think of mercury pollution, Kathleen, they probably think about mercury and the fish they're eating, at least that's me. But you've actually been looking into another way that mercury's getting into the environment that has nothing to do with fish, right? So what is it?
Kathleen: Well, actually, it's gold mining.
Neil: So how much mercury pollution is there from gold mining?
Kathleen: Well, are you not surprised that gold is like contributing to mercury pollution? Because I really had no idea that there was any link. Like that never would have dawned on me.
Neil: You obviously don't have a lot of gold at home, though.
Kathleen: I don't mine a lot of gold.
Neil: But seriously, I mean, what got you interested in this topic in the first place?
Kathleen: Well, I had started looking into mercury pollution because I came across a study that was talking about the amount of mercury pollution that was in the world and how different ecosystems help clean it up. And so I started falling down this rabbit hole of like, you know, what's contributing to this? And of course, I also thought, okay, mercury, fish, don't eat too much tuna, whatever.
And then I came across this really interesting fact, which was that a large amount of our mercury pollution is actually coming from small-scale gold mining. And I don't know about you, but I had never heard of that. And I thought, how could that be? What does mercury have to do with small-scale gold mining? And yeah, do you want to guess how much pollution comes from small-scale gold mining?
Neil: I don't even know how much mercury there is in the world. So, I mean, I wouldn't even know about the pollution, but I don't know, maybe... No, I really don't want to put a figure to this. Sorry. You tell me.
Kathleen: It's a lot. It's 40%. Forty percent of our mercury pollution in the world comes from small-scale gold mining, which means, you know, the people who are engaging in this industry, they tend to come from impoverished communities across Central and South America, Africa, Southeast Asia.
There aren't many options for them to make a living. And so, one kind of quick way to do that, so to speak, is, you know, if they're in a region where there is gold in the soil or in the sediment, to dig up the ore and to get the gold. And the best way to do that for them is to use mercury, because mercury binds with gold particles.
And so kind of to cut a long story short, they have to burn off the mercury once it's bound to the gold. And those mercury vapors, of course, are incredibly toxic to their health, but it's then also getting into the environment in other ways.
That's kind of the short story of how it, yeah, becomes such a big pollutant, because a lot of the world's gold comes from this industry. We're talking about millions of men, women, and children who engage in this industry. So as you can tell, I thought, wow, that's really, I've never heard of this, this is interesting.
So, I ended up getting in touch with a man who works in Peru. His name is France Cabanillas. And he's involved in a kind of one-of-a-kind project in the Amazon rainforest there in Peru. And so, he was showing me some pictures because I wanted to understand like what exactly he's doing with small-scale gold mining.
CLIP
Kathleen: Explain what I’m looking at here.
France Cabanillas: It’s like two pieces of clean gold, both of them were produced by the miners, no? Without mercury.
Kathleen: Okay, so what he's saying there is they are using techniques where they can produce this gold without mercury. This is part of his goal. And this comes back to the Minamata Convention that you mentioned briefly up top. And we're going to get into that later, what that is and why that's important.
But one thing to understand now is like the Minamata convention, kind of emerged out of this really terrible story from Japan in the late 1950s. Industrial pollution led to widespread mercury poisoning of a local population because it got into the fish. That's kind of how the awareness was raised around that.
And then decades later, in 2013, this global treaty comes about, how do we curb mercury pollution? So, we might be more familiar with this treaty in terms of like mercury being phased out of batteries, mercury being phased out of different parts of industry.
But another thing they're doing is they're putting money into projects like this to get small scale gold miners to stop using mercury. France Cabanillas is one of these people who is trying to do this. But of course, that's not the whole story.
Neil: And these small-scale gold miners, I mean, are they aware of the health risks?
Kathleen: I don't know that that's the right question. I think just like a lot of people in this world who don't really have many options when it comes to making a living, it's not a question of whether it's bad for their health or not. They're kind of between a rock and a hard place. And that's where a lot of these people fall into the picture.
But yeah, but there's another part of the story that comes into the environmental aspect and also France Cabanillas's project that is really interesting.
So, I wanted to show you a picture to kind of illustrate what he's doing and to see if you can, yeah, just give me your first impression.
Neil: Okay, oh, what's that? That's an aerial shot from above with a drone, I would assume. Lots of, no, these aren't puddles. This is like, these are these lakes, big lakes, and in between, almost like barren concrete patches, it looks like interspersed with some trees? I don't know, what is this.
Kathleen: Okay, so this is part of the Amazon rainforest that has been mined for gold. And...
Neil: Okay, this does not look like the Amazon rainforest to me. This looks like a barren land almost.
Kathleen: So, the other aspect of this project that France Cabanillas is working on is tackling a compounded problem. On the one hand, there's mercury poisoning. It's getting into the environment. It's harming people's health. He can't stop small-scale gold mining, so the best thing he can do is to get the mercury out of the equation, show them different techniques.
But the other thing that he researches and is an expert on is how to regrow the Amazon rainforest, which is a very difficult undertaking because we're talking about a very fragile, very unique ecosystem. And so What he's trying to do is to bring the miners into this process of if you're going to take something from the land, you have to give something back to it.
And this is especially important when it comes to mercury pollution because trees, forests, especially the Amazon rainforests, are important mercury sinks. They're natural ecosystems that help clean up mercury pollution.
So, you can see this is a really big problem if you have gold miners using mercury and cutting down a forest at the same time. It's kind of the worst possible scenario. And so you have just this very interesting cycle of problems.
But what really attracted me to the story is you also have people who have real solutions that are actually working. So, it's not a doom and gloom story. It's a really interesting story. And yeah, so as you can tell, I fell in a complete rabbit hole with this one.
Neil: Well, Kathleen, you've certainly piqued my interest. I can't wait to hear this deep dive. Can you please just tell us who you talk to first? And then we'll be back at the end of the show to unpick everything, right?
Kathleen: So, the first person I called was actually the person whose study I found on the whole link between mercury sinks, the Amazon rainforest, and mercury pollution, a guy named Ari Feinberg. And I wanted to call him up so he could just explain the basics of how mercury gets into the environment and then what it does when it gets there, because it is also very interesting.
Something I had no clue about, but really shines a light on how this pollution that is happening in Central and South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, from small-scale gold mining is impacting all of us. So, he was a great person to talk to, and this is Ari…
Ari Feinberg: Mercury is a tricky element. It’s highly volatile and it’s also a metal which is quite unique.
You probably know mercury as this silvery-looking liquid that was once commonly used in thermometers.
It’s also a pollutant that gets emitted naturally into the environment by volcanic eruptions and forest fires. But human activities have pushed the amount of mercury in the atmosphere to 500% above normal levels. And in the ocean, to 200% above normal levels. That’s according to figures from the European Environment Agency in 2018.
Ari Feinberg: So, mercury is emitted by several different sources, the human sources of mercury include fossil fuel combustion, smelting, product use, artisanal gold mining.
Ari’s a postdoctoral fellow in Spain at the Blas Cabrera Institute of Physical Chemistry. Incidentally, Spain also plays an important part in this story of mercury and gold, but we’ll come back that a bit later.
Ari’s focused a lot of his research on how mercury acts once it’s in the atmosphere.
Ari Feinberg: And so once mercury is in the atmosphere, it can be transported globally and we find high levels of mercury in remote areas, even like the Arctic, for example. And then once mercury deposits eventually into, into different ecosystems, because of its high volatility, it can be reemitted.
What he’s talking about here is something called the “mercury cycle.” Let’s say you have a coal-fired power plant. The pollution it pumps into the air contains many different toxins, including mercury. And it doesn’t just float around in one place.
Ari Feinberg: So, mercury has an atmospheric lifetime of around six months before it's removed from the atmosphere. And this means that it can really spread globally and travel thousands of kilometers in the atmosphere.
Eventually, it leaves the atmosphere and deposits in the soil or the water.
And water’s a big problem, because microbes in the water help turn mercury into an even more toxic substance called “methylmercury.”
Now, that methylmercury can do one of two things. It can stay in the water and build up in fish, for example – which is incidentally, where warnings about mercury in our seafood come from – or, if it’s closer to the surface, the mercury ultimately evaporates back into the air.
And since mercury doesn’t break down naturally in the environment, this happens over and over again.
Ari Feinberg: We call this the grasshopper effect that it can go from the atmosphere to the ocean, be readmitted and travel again and deposited and be readmitted.
And this is where forests come in. Ari says there’s growing research that trees help absorb mercury.
He recently headed a study at MIT, and according to their model, the Amazon rainforest makes up 30% of the world’s mercury sink. So, when the Amazon gets deforested, the problem compounds: more mercury gets released into the air and the Amazon can’t help reabsorb it.
This study also puts forward a new idea: deforestation is also driving mercury pollution. And by their estimation, it’s probably responsible for about 10% of the 2,000 tons of mercury emitted by humans every year.
In the case of the South America, the story doesn’t quite end there…
Ari Feinberg: And so actually it takes hundreds of years for mercury to be really removed from the from the environment. And so we're still dealing today with pollution of mercury that's been occurring over history.
The historic emissions Ari mentioned just then are a big question mark for researchers. They know mercury sticks around for a long time, but it’s difficult to put an exact number on how much of the mercury still floating around is actually pollution from previous decades, or even centuries.
But what researchers do know is where mercury has been used heavily. And South America is one of those places, dating back to the Spanish conquistadors.
Time to dive into some Spanish colonial history…
Corey Malcom: The galleon that I had worked on and am most familiar with is a ship called the Nuestra Senora de Atocha that sank in 1622 very near Key West here
That’s Dr. Corey Malcom. He’s the lead historian for the Florida Keys History Center in Key West. He started his career as a maritime archaeologist.
The ship he’s talking about is the Nuestra Senora de Atocha.
One of the many ships that crossed the Atlantic to bring the riches of the Americas back to Spain. When it sank in a hurricane in the early 1600s, it took down a treasure trove of South American silver, gold and emeralds that would be worth over $1 billion today.
Corey Malcom: The Spanish system was really designed to exploit the riches of the Americas in those early days. And whether that was through …
He says they discovered silver in what is now Mexico and then further south in Peru and Bolivia. In 1545, they came upon what would become one of the world’s most important silver mines in a place called Potosí, about 500 kilometers southeast of La Paz.
Corey Malcom: And for the first couple of decades, they would use sort of traditional smelting methods. You'd crush ore and heat it and try to you know get some of the silver to come out of there, but then in the mid-1560s, a new method of extracting silver from ore became known, and that was mercury amalgamation.
What they did was turn the ore into something close to a powder. Then they added liquid mercury and some other chemical compounds. And the result was that the silver would bond with the mercury.
And then once they heated the amalgam up, the mercury would evaporate and leave behind pure silver.
He says this process revolutionized silver and gold mining for centuries.
Corey Malcom: That required, though, a huge amount of mercury, and so they would ship across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain to the New World, you know, what today we call quicksilver galleons, but they were they were just ships designed to carry large cargoes of mercury that very often wooden boxes, leather lined wooden boxes. They would fill with the liquid mercury, put that down on the hold of the ship, load up other cargos and then sail across the ocean to …
It should be noted that Spain has the largest known mercury deposit on Earth in a place called Almadén. All in all, a third of the world’s mercury production over the past two millenia came from there.
In fact, if you’ve ever seen pictures of the bright red pigment the Romans used called vermilion, that also came from Almadén’s deposit of the ore called cinnabar. The same ore that mercury comes from. There’s also evidence the Romans developed an early technique using mercury to extract gold, too.
Mercury has helped drive the centuries’ old dream of endless riches in the Americas. It’s also been part of a longer history of tragic side effects. From deadly longevity potions, to treatments for syphilis. And other examples, like the 19th century English hat makers who developed tremors and neurological symptoms after exposure to a mercury solution used on wool felt hats. That’s where the term mad as a hatter comes from. Today, though, there’s no denying mercury's catastrophic impact on human health. Today, though, there’s no denying its catastrophic impact on human health.
Mario Rodas: The artisanal miners still have to burn their amalgam, and now they're doing it at their houses. You know, using tuna cans.
That’s Mario Rodas. He’s the Environment and Energy Program Officer for the UN’s Development Program in Ecuador, and one of the people trying to create incentives for miners to ditch mercury.
Mario Rodas: Even I've seen children performing the burning of the amalgam. And they are breathing the vapors coming out of the of the mercury. So this is this has been the, you know, not a good alternative. This has been this has been but much more or much worse than it was before.
The signs of mercury poisoning are very noticeable if you could study what happened in the Minamata Bay in Japan.
One of the reasons we know so much about the dangers of mercury now is because of a place called Minamata Bay. In the 1950s and 60s, residents in and around the Japanese city of Minamata experienced severe mercury poisoning from the local fish. The cause was the toxic runoff from a nearby chemical plant. At least 70,000 people were impacted, from birth defects to neurological impairment, and in some cases, death.
Years later, in 2013, a global treaty called Minamata Convention was introduced, and the result has been a global reduction in the use of mercury in batteries and electronic equipment, and also reduction in the burning of fossil fuels, too. Right now, 148 countries are in the process of phasing out mercury as per the treaty.
There’s been one sector that’s been really hard to eradicate mercury from, though, and that’s artisanal and small-scale gold mining.
This is where about 20% of the world’s gold comes from. But it’s also the biggest single mercury polluter globally – emitting nearly 40% of this toxic pollutant, which is almost double the amount produced by coal combustion.
The thing is that mercury’s long journey through South American history has sped up with the help of the Interoceanic Highway. This highway runs from Peru’s Pacific Coast east through the Amazon and then back down to Brazil’s Atlantic coast.
It was built in the middle of a goldrush that’s saw gold production across the globe jump by 55% between 1995 and 2018.
And these two developments have spurred on, even more people to flock to gold rush towns. Especially to the epicenter of alluvial gold mining. A region called Madre de Dios in the Peruvian Amazon.
France Cabanillas: It was ready in 2012. Many, many people that before came here take, I don't know, three days, four days. Now they can go here in, I don't know, 8 hours, 10 hours by the highway, no? It's a very, very easy way to come here, no?
That’s France Cabanillas, who we heard from at the beginning of the episode. He says the miners coming in droves to Madre de Dios are from impoverished communities.
For them, dealing with mercury is a risk many are willing to take to earn good money.
Peru is currently South America’s biggest gold producer. Its poverty rate hovers around 25%. Meaning, one in four doesn’t earn much more than the equivalent of 100 US dollars a month. So, the prospect of getting $60 for just one single gram of gold is good one.
One approach to put the breaks on this trend has been to ban mercury, but if anything that’s just made sellers and buyers turn to the black market. As Mario said, even burning amalgam in their homes using tuna cans.
Mario works with a global initiative called Planet Gold. One project they’ve slowly started to roll out works to show miners how much money they’re losing by using mercury.
Mario Rodas: What is happening right now is that an artisanal miner go to a plant with their mineral. The plant, perform an analysis and if they have 10 grams of gold per ton of mineral, the plant tells them that they have 6.
Essentially, what’s happening is the miners are losing money left and right. There’s the processing fee. And then because mercury is fast, but not very thorough, there’s some gold left in the waste byproduct called the tailing that now belongs to the plant.
According to Mario, the miners end up losing 60% of their earnings.
So, the project Mario’s working is trying to create a better deal. They get miners to sell the ore to processing plants that are mercury-free. In exchange, a lab analysis tells the miners exactly how much gold they have. And they get a bigger cut
Mario Rodas: We are telling them from the beginning you have 10. The plant will pay them for seven, for example, because they need to process. But in that deal they are earning three more than they were used to, right? And they are not spending money and time in, you know, paying the plant and the mercury and process in the middle so that's the alternative we give.
He says they’ve started with two or three artisanal gold miners and their program is growing, and stands to become policy in Ecuador in the future.
Cutting down on mercury use is the only sure way to reduce these emissions. But what about the long-term impact from mercury exposure?
Studies on miners’ health have been limited because miners tend to be reluctant to come forward. But there was a 2016 study by researchers from Duke University in the US took hair samples from hundreds of people living along the Interoceanic Highway, the Madre de Dios River and also from 2,000 people from a local indigenous reserve. They found that 40% of the residents had mercury levels above the maximum recommended by the World Health Organization.
PROMO
Kathleen: Great…And the next picture is?
France: ok the first one, you can say a very very, how you say…
France Cabanillas is a forestry engineer and project coordinator for a non-profit called Pure Earth. One of the solutions they’ve been working on together is reforesting the Amazon.
It’s hard to look at his pictures and not notice the catastrophic impact of this vicious vector of deforestation, gold mining and mercury contamination on a fragile ecosystem like the Amazon.
France Cabanillas: It was a primary forest in the beginning, but now you can see a reforestation process that we did, that plantation we did in February 2023 In the second picture you can shihuahuaco tree.
The picture shows a worker standing on a large plot of saplings spaced about two meters apart. He’s holding on to a fragile sapling with one hand and in the other hand a red canister.
These are shihuahuaco trees.
Shihuahuaco trees are the ancient giants of the Amazon. They can grow up to 60 meters tall, and the oldest ones are said to be more than 1,000 years old.
France Cabanillas: It’s like considered very, very important tree in the Amazon. It's like a very representative tree in the Amazon species in the Amazon, no? And you can see that it grow in that kind of land with different also ingredients that we put in the soil. It's not like the sand by themselves give that nutrients to them, shihuahuaco tree, no? In the third…
Kathleen: Yes, sorry.
France: Yeah?
Kathleen: No, sorry, just really quick. But yeah, looking at this, I mean it looks like it almost looks like you're, you're planting trees on a beach. That's what the soil looks like. It doesn't look anything like what I would associate with, I don’t know, I just imagined rich soil in the Amazon.
France: Exactly it is difficult, but, yes, we can do that. OK. It's possible, no?
Cutting the Amazon and then reforesting it in a way that actually works means doing a lot of research first. That’s because, the soil found in rainforests is very low in nutrients.
The Amazon for example relies on fungi and bacteria to decompose organic matter like dead plants and animals – so once the forest is destroyed, all that’s left is sandy soil.
The good news he says is that reforestation can work, but in this case, requires at least three years of intensive care.
Which raises the question: why not just try to ban deforestation? He says this would create other problems.
France Cabanillas: If we think to ban for example the formal sector here in Madre de Dios, I am sure that you can have very, very strong socio-political conflict that may maybe never can solve, no? It's a very, very risk to think about that. And also because it's a legal activity. If we talk about the concessions, it's a legal activity. In the legal context, it's the same if we if I have mining concession or if I have a forestry concession of if I have eco-tourist concession is the same, it's the same category because all that activities are legal with authorization of the government.
Which is why part of the solution he’s been working on is to create incentives for the miners. The first is that they help certify the miners to use non-mercury methods, like the shaking table. This method isolates the gold powder using water and a mechanized table that shakes. It takes about an hour, so twice as long as mercury, but it’s non-toxic, and the miners are more likely to get better yields.
The other is that they involve the miners in the reforestation process. He says these men and women often don’t come from the region and so once they are included in caring for the forest, their connection to the Amazon begins to grow, too.
And another benefit, Cabanillas and other researchers from Pure Earth showed in a 2022 study was that reforestation … did in fact …help prevent mercury … from reaching the watershed.
There’s one elephant in the room left to address, a golden elephant if you will. And that’s: where is the gold ending up? The answer is, unfortunately, not straightforward. Artisanal and small-scale gold mining is not illegal per se. There are many miners who work within the bounds of the law.
But it is a sector struggling to disentangle itself from organized crime, human exploitation, and international money laundering. Especially amid widespread poverty, corruption and gold prices that continue to rise.
Neil: Okay, so one question that I found asking myself was just how much of the world's gold is extracted using mercury? Do you know that, Kathleen?
Kathleen: Are you worried that you're wearing gold?
Neil: I am, actually. I mean, that's something, that connection, right? Am I contributing to deforestation in the Amazon by buying jewelry in Europe?
Kathleen: Okay, so this is a really hard question to answer because a lot of this gold is not easily traceable. What I can tell you is that the general estimate is that about 20% of the world's gold comes from artisanal and small-scale gold mining. It's not an illegal industry in and of itself.
A lot of this mining is allowed to take place, the part that becomes difficult is who it's being sold to and what they're doing with it. And that's related to a lot of criminality and a lot of shady dealings as well, but it's not the miners themselves. So I can understand your concern, but it's a really hard question to answer.
Neil: Right, okay. So what about the health aspects then? You know, what outcomes can you report there? How many people are impacted by this?
Kathleen: So, there was a professor I was speaking with who didn't make it into this episode. He works for the University Hospital in Munich, and he has the wonderful name of Stephan Böse-O'Reilly, which I really love that double German-Irish name going on.
And he's been researching this issue of mercury poisoning in the continents that I keep mentioning, and has seen this firsthand, has tested people for mercury poisoning, and he says that the estimates that you tend to find of up to 20 million people worldwide being directly impacted, that's the number he goes with as well. So, 20 million men, women, and children who work in mining are directly impacted.
But he said it's probably more like 100 million, because you have people in the surrounding communities who might not work in mining, but they're impacted in other ways by the mercury getting into the water, the mercury getting into the soil, or as we established in this episode, mercury has its own cycle that it works through getting into the air and then coming back into the water. And it's just a problem that is self-perpetuating.
So, his estimate was that many, many more people are affected. And then of course, our big concern that all of us have when it comes to mercury poisoning, and again, we often think about fish consumption, warnings for pregnant women, don't eat too much fish or be careful what kind of fish you eat.
Similar thing here, women who are exposed to mercury vapors or mercury in the environment in those areas, of course, can pass this toxicity down to a fetus, which means children are already disadvantaged in that they are potentially born with lower IQs because of it. It’s possible. I'm not saying this happens in every single case. I'm not an expert on that.
But this is one of the dangers of mercury poisoning is, you know, aside from the health outcomes of severe tremors or problems with coordination, which if anybody's curious about what that looks like, you can go on YouTube and you can actually find footage of, you know, like doctors doing these tests on locals to see if they are suffering from mercury poisoning. And it's very obvious, but this professor that I spoke with, he said, you know, with cognitive decline, that's a much harder thing to assess because in a regular everyday conversation, you wouldn't notice it. It's not like people who are affected by this can't speak properly or formulate a thought. It's more really to do with IQ. And that's much harder to study.
But I found that really mind-boggling because if you consider how many hundreds of years this has been going on in regions where mercury poisoning has stayed in the environment, I mean, you just really wonder like how far back these health outcomes go. So, something that I thought about quite a bit while I was working on this, yeah.
Neil: Well, I mean, there's also that, but the other fact that I also find quite mind-boggling is just how ubiquitous it is in a certain sense, right? Because I always assumed, you know, okay, mercury, you know, old school thermometers, it would be in that. But just the fact that, you know, you've got it in gold mining, the artisanal gold mining, but also, there's another connection which I didn't know about, and that is coal, burning coal, right?
Kathleen: Yeah, that's something that I'm researching right now, because I was also not really aware of the fact that coal burning is largely responsible for mercury getting into fish. I always thought it was industrial pollution, just like runoff or something, or with the example of Minamata Bay in Japan, that was a very clear example of chemical runoff from factories that made it into the water and made it into the fish. But actually, because of how mercury cycles through the environment, burning coal is what's contributing to mercury and fish.
And yeah, and there are some really interesting lawsuits going on in Germany related to this actually, because the most populous state, North Rhine Westphalia, didn't do very well when a group called Environmental Action Germany was testing to see what the levels of mercury were in the fish in the Rhine River. And it turns out in this area of the country in western Germany, where there has historically been a lot of coal burning, that there was one sample where like levels were 11 times what's allowed.
And so, this environmental group is suing the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. And they're also trying to, through a second lawsuit, make the states through which the Rhine River flows more accountable for upholding like EU water laws. Because as things are in Germany, because it's a federal system, every state has more control over how they interpret laws or which laws they have, right? And that includes environmental laws.
So, we're talking about the Rhine River, we're talking about mercury poisoning, we're talking about coal-fired power plants in Germany or coal burning. They want to see all of the five states that are affected by the Rhine get on the same page about this. And so that's something where I'm just like, I can't wait for this.
Neil: The next deep dive.
Kathleen: The next deep dive, yeah.
Neil: But then, I mean, also just to put this into context then, if we're looking at, the pollution aspect, I mean, I'm also surprised because I always thought, the German coal plants were like state-of-the-art, that these scrubbers and filter systems that would pretty much capture everything. But even then, if they capture the mercury, that's like a hazardous waste, right? They have to take it to a hazardous waste site or recycle it somehow.
Kathleen: That is something that I'm also trying to find out more about, because that's part of what the lawsuit is about, is trying to make the plants cleaner. I wonder if that's even enough, right? And also, when we talk about coal burning, this has been such a huge issue in Germany, of course, but we're watching other major countries like China, for example. They're still engaging in a lot of that.
And, you know, this isn't just a pollution issue where you say, well, I don't live nearby, so it doesn't affect me. Actually, with this one, it kind of does. And the question is, to what extent? But, just on a final note, when mercury turns up in places like the Arctic, I think that bears thinking about - how did it get there?
Neil: Okay, that wraps up this week's episode of Living Planet. It was produced and mixed by Kathleen Schuster and edited by me, Neil King. And our sound engineers were Ziad Abou Sleimann and Lucy Krupp.
What did you think of this episode? We'd love to hear from you. Send us an e-mail to livingplanet at DW.com or leave a comment on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to Living Planet. That's it for now. Thanks for listening.