Metals

Metals: A Getting Started Guide

Despite decades of international action, exposure globally to toxic metals is pervasive and persists at crisis levels, and businesses have a crucial role to play in protecting people and nature from metal pollutants.

Anchored in research, our Metals: A Getting Started Guide aims to support your company as it develops a strategy to eliminate metal pollutants from their own operations and in their value chains.

Protocol on Heavy Metals

The 1998 Aarhus Protocol on Heavy Metals provides strict limits on cadmium, lead, and mercury emissions. It outlines best available techniques for reducing such emissions from industrial sources, combustion processes, and waste incineration, and also introduces measures to reduce and manage heavy metal emissions from products such as batteries, measuring devices, pesticides, and paint.

Heavy Metals Toxicity and the Environment

This resource is a helpful primer on arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, and mercury - five priority metals of public health significance. For each metal it explains environmental occurrence, industrial production and use, the potential for human exposure, and mechanisms of toxicity and carcinogenicity.

The Minamata Convention on Mercury

This international treaty, first signed in 2013 by 140 countries, is designed to protect human health and the environment from the dangers of widespread mercury pollution. The treaty requirements cover the entire life cycle of mercury, including phasing out mercury use in products and manufacturing processes (e.g. batteries and pesticides), banning new mercury mines (e.g. small-scale gold mining), limiting the emission of mercury into the environment (e.g. coal burning), and decontaminating sites. The annex also provides a breakdown of all goods and processes affected by the agreement. This document will be most useful to sustainability and supply chain management teams that want to build their understanding of mercury-related regulations and how they might relate to your organisation and value chain.

Guidance on the Management of Contaminated Sites

This guide by the UN Environmental Programme can help you remediate mercury contaminated sites in line with article 12 of the Minamata Convention. It begins with an introduction to the issue of mercury pollution and a summary of remedial obligations agreed upon by signatories of the Convention. It then provides practical guidance on identifying contaminated sites, engaging the public, and assessing risk to human health and the environmental. It also covers different options to manage and remediate contamination. The final sections outline how to evaluate the costs and benefits of taking action and how to verify efficacy. This guidance will be most useful to environmental health and safety (EHS) and engineering departments.