11-13-2019, 09:38 AM
quote:
Originally posted by HereOnThePrimalEdge
Have you ever broken or thrown away a thermometer? Either indoor/outdoor or body temperature? How many have been sold over the years on Big Island, how many are in the landfill or with other garbage on the side of a road?
I’m not a betting man, but I’d bet homeowners have dumped far more mercury on the aina than all the mercury contained in all the telescopes in Hawaii.
This. On the wall of my parents house in CNY is a still functioning thermostat that uses a grape sized glass bulb filled with mercury as a switch. These switches were extremely common. Renovating? Rip it off the wall and toss it in the trash. The mercury footprint of the parents of the current protesters and of some of the protesters themselves, on an individual level, probably greatly excedes the actual amount of unrecovered mercury released by any of those documented spills because the observatories document and report such things while the average layman, of which the protesters are a particularly obnoxious and self righteous subset, blithely pollute without even acknowledging doing so. Think oil leaks from protesters' trucks and invasive ants from building materials. The observatories acknowledge those risks and have best practices in place to mitigate them. The protesters? Goodness only knows what's going through their heads but it does not appear to be such tedious concerns.