After announcing plans to require dental offices to have amalgam separators in waste water outlets in order to protect the environment from dental amalgam mercury, the Seattle/King County (Washington) METRO (Department of Metropolitan Services) has recently announced an abrupt and unexplained reversal of policy. Previously, METRO had determined that 14% of the mercury found in environmental water was derived from dental offices, which was the basis for their ruling to eliminate a major source of environmental mercury pollution.

In the announcement of the sudden policy reversal David Grigsby, director of METRO's Water Pollution Control Department stated: "Many dental offices have already installed amalgam separation units and we expect this practice to continue without a formal regulatory requirement. We believe this decision is in our community's best interest because it is cost-effective and protects our environment." METRO outlined five steps it will take:

• Promote voluntary use of amalgam separation units (to reduce discharge of amalgam in waste water).
• Continue its approval process of these units.
• Continue education efforts for dentists.
• Support research to determine the environmental fate of amalgam in municipal waste water treatment plants and biosolids.
• Continue reviewing mercury values in treatment plant influent, effluent and biosolids to confirm that mercury levels remain low.

The American Dental Association reported on this METRO reversal in the ADA News [Vol. 26(4):1, 20 Feb 1995] article entitled "Grassroots Victory in Seattle." Reporting the tremendous effort expended by organized dentistry on the national, state and local levels, the ADA clearly identified the "grass roots" as that of organized dentistry, not of the public. Dr. Victor Barry, ADA 11th district trustee and past president of the Washington State Dental Association, was quoted as saying: "It's a good thing if we can use low tech and low cost methods for removing as much amalgam as possible from waste water. We want to be good citizens and environmentally responsible."; and commended METRO for "treating the profession in a professional manner by relying on voluntary compliance. I think METRO, based on its statement about supporting research on amalgam fate, agrees the science isn't complete. They said at the March conference that the nature of the process is not well understood."

In view of the admission that the fate of dental amalgam mercury is unknown, the wisdom of reliance on voluntary compliance of the dental profession remains to be seen; after all, this has been the case up to now! Metro Seattle is not the only area investigating dentistry's contribution to environmental mercury pollution. This is obviously a currently hot topic. Four European nations already require amalgam separators in dental office waste water streams. A number of other locales in the United States are addressing this concern, including the San Francisco Bay area, San Bernardino, Tucson, Detroit, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C. Estimates of dentistry's contribution to environmental mercury have ranged from 14% to 50%.

The definition of "voluntary compliance" must also be addressed. Assuming that all, or at least most, dentists have amalgam separators installed in their office waste water lines (numerous mercury-free dentists around the country have already done so), will dentists be conscientious enough to dispose of the amalgam waste properly? Most amalgam separators are not expensive; disposal of the waste is the costly factor! Further, few of the companies providing amalgam separators have arrangements to dispose of the waste; most leave that responsibility in the hands of the dentists. In view of this expense, it is not inconceivable that some dentists would simply dump the waste in the trash or in a toilet at another locale. The dental establishment, led by the American Dental Association, answers these environmental concerns by claiming that "amalgam" is not "mercury," the amalgam being so stable that its mercury content is not released to the environment.

For many years, dentists have been instructed to store scrap amalgam under a sulfur solution in tightly sealed containers and to dispose of the material in an environmentally sound manner. Further, the position of the dental establishment regarding amalgam in patients was that mercury was "locked in" dental amalgam and therefore rendered "harmless", in spite of documentation to the contrary dating back to the 19th century. Finally, the dental profession had to admit that mercury was indeed continuously released from mixed dental amalgam. Now, however, the profession says that mercury is released only when mixed amalgam is in the dental office or in the mouths of patients. Mercury is not released when amalgam is in the environment.

The recently published study by Sutow and associates, abstracted below, confirms that submerging dental amalgam in water does NOT prevent the escape of mercury. Now, all of a sudden, we are told that scrap amalgam in the environment is NOT a hazard! It would seem that a conflicting message on scrap amalgam is now being developed by the dental profession, a policy that cannot possibly bode well for public confidence in the profession.

Source: BioProbe Newsletter

Also make sure to read these books: Poison in Your Teeth: Mercury Amalgam (Silver) Fillings...Hazardous to Your Health! and Mercury Detoxification by Tom McGuire