Maine Sen. Susan Collins has introduced legislation that would create a new program to measure mercury levels across the United States.
Collins says the bill was prompted by a number of scientific studies, including those conducted by the Biodiversity Research Institute in Gorham, Maine, which show that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's current methods for regulating the toxic chemical are inadequate.
The bill would establish mercury monitoring sites across the nation to measure mercury levels in the air, rain, soil, lakes and streams and in plants and animals, Collins says. She says it would provide much needed data to the EPA, which Collins says is now relying largely on a computer model to regulate the toxic mercury emissions.
"I was deeply troubled by the computer data which EPA used to justify its mercury rule," Collins says in a statement. "This data was neither peer-reviewed nor verified with scientific measurements, and yet EPA used it as the basis for its mercury rule which does not account for mercury hotspots and which places children and pregnant women at risk."
Collins says studies by the Biodiversity Research Institute and others show the existence of mercury "hotspots" in the Northeast, one of which registered mercury deposition levels five times higher than previously estimated by the EPA.