On 14/08/2012 19:02, djornsk wrote:
Some 30 years ago I broke a manometer used for balancing carbs and
collected the mercury into a glass jar which has been living in the shed.
I recently became a bit bothered about the potential risk should someone
disturb it when I am not around, so decided to take it to the local
recycling centre after establishing that they would accept it so long as
it was inside a sealed container.

So far so good. Although you would have been better off selling it to a
place that recycles waste mercury - it is a fairly valuable if toxic
liquid metal. Your local school or university chemical lab would have
been a better bet for knowing what to do with it.

I have seen Maxwell's spur demonstrated live in a classroom and that
arcs and sparks into hot liquid mercury. That is dangerous.

To my supply the attendant took the jar and instead of taking it to a
secure cabinet as I expected just threw it in the metal recycling skip.
I can understand that mercury is a metal but so is plutonium and one
wouldn't expect that to be thrown in with the scrap.

Clueless monkey with single digit IQ and life expectancy to match.

I have also seen the morons at our recycling tip putting asbestos cement
boards into a crusher covered head to toe in white dust. No PPE

Perhaps the explaination lies in the fact that the risks are to a degree
mitigated by mechanical handling and adequate ventilation from the time
the scrap is deposited in the skips, or alternatively the handling and
storage precautions ISTR from my schooldays were OTT.

j

Mercury metal isn't all that bad unless you breath the fumes. Mercury
salts and especially organomercury compounds can be seriously deadly. An
ICPMS practitioner was killed by a tiny leak in a protective glove
working with methyl mercury a few years back.

Mercury metal was used until fairly recently for zenith transit
telescopes and has made a resurgence for spinning mirror scopes eg:

http://www.astro.ubc.ca/lmt/lzt/

The explanation at the tip is that they don't know WTF they are doing.
The simplest way to make it inert is to mix it into zinc powder to make
a crude version of dental amalgam which is then more or less inert.

Your mercury actually had resale value and should have been sold to
someone who knew how to handle it rather than handed over to a moron.

Regards,
Martin Brown