Area Hospitals Lead Way in Making Medicine Mercury Free

The Oregon Center for Environmental Health, a non-profit group focused on pollution prevention issues, is announcing a major victory in the effort to get Oregon hospitals to find less polluting ways of doing business.

Under the auspices of the Health Care Without Harm Campaign, a national effort to reduce toxic hospital waste, the group has made Oregon a leadership state and Providence Portland Medical Center, OHSU and Legacy Health System are setting the pace. All three institutions have become leaders in the effort to reduce our exposure to mercury by eliminating health care devices such as mercury thermometers, blood pressure units, and properly recycling fluorescent lights.

The hospitals are working on eliminating mercury in the community as well; both Legacy Health System and OHSU have sponsored several community thermometer exchanges where over 2,000 mercury thermometers have been turned in and exchanged for safer digital thermometers.

Mercury is a reproductive toxin and a potent neurotoxin that affects the brain and the central nervous system. If these products are broken and disposed of improperly, or if they are incinerated, mercury is released to the environment. This poses potentially significant harm to human health and the natural environment

All three hospitals are eliminating mercury in their organizations by phasing out the purchasing of mercury medical devices, replacing mercury containing thermometers with digital ones, and switching to mercury-free blood pressure units. Providence Portland Medical Center has been successful in replacing all of its mercury-containing blood pressure units with mercury-free units, and both OHSU and Legacy are working toward that goal. .

Fluorescent lights are another big source of mercury pollution and hospitals dispose of hundreds of these lights each year. While these bulbs are more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs, they contain mercury, and often wind up in solid waste landfills where they will remain virtually forever, polluting the soil and ground water. All three hospitals are taking the initiative of handling the bulbs properly. Recycling programs are already in place at Providence Portland and OHSU . Legacy Health System’s Recycling Specialist, Tom Badrick is currently developing a lamps recycling proposal to submit to upper management for approval. Donald Ludwig, OHSU’s Environmental Affairs Manager calculates in 2001, OHSU recycled 31,000 linear feet of fluorescent tubing, “that is a measure equivalent to the height of Mount Everest”

Hospital Waste Managers participating in Oregon Healthcare Without Harm (OHCWH) were asked what the barriers are to recycling the bulbs. All were in agreement that lack of education and training of employees who switch out the bulbs was the big hurdle, not cost. “Recycling bulbs is an easy process to set up”, says Tom Badrick, Recycling Specialist at Legacy, “as long as the employees are being educated on the potential health hazards of throwing the bulbs in the dumpster and trained on how to properly store the bulbs until they are picked up for recycling.”

Ecolights is an approved facility in Seattle, WA, that recycles lamps, batteries, lamp ballasts, computer monitors and electronics. Jim Pursley, Portland-based manager for Ecolights, said “The cost of recycling adds about 8 cents per year to the cost of the lamp.” Lamps are processed down to raw materials and recycled according to their type: glass is sent to a quarry to be mixed with rock and gravel, aluminum goes to a metal recycler, mercury bearing phosphor powder is sent to a retort facility where the powder is distilled and the mercury reclaimed, purified and resold back into the system. This process recycles 99.9% of the lamp.

By eliminating mercury in their organizations, these Oregon hospitals have taken the lead in helping to achieve the American Hospital Associations goal to the virtual elimination of mercury-containing waste from the health care field waste stream by the year 2005.

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