Elemental Business: Mercury
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2014
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mercury is the bad-boy of the periodic table, often called 'quicksilver', it is both mesmerising and toxic as Professor Andrea Sella of University College London vividly explains. In the fourth of our series examining the global economics of chemical elements Justin Rowlatt speaks to Tim Kasten of the United Nations' Environment Programme who is one of the architects of a new international treaty that aims to ban the metal from industrial uses by 2020. As we discover, that ban will affect everything from coal-fired power stations to small-scale gold miners in developing countries, to the illumination of the lowly office. We visit a fluorescent bulb recycling plant outisde Norwich and speak to small scale gold miners in Ghana about how the ban might affect them. But it is all in a good cause, as Justin discovers when he visits one of the finest fishmongers in London.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a BBC podcast. You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use at BBCworldservis.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:12.4 | Hello, I'm Justin Rowlatt. Welcome to Business Daily. Today we continue our series taking the building blocks of the universe, the chemical elements, as the starting point to explore the world economy. This week, we've got one of the most fascinating elements of them all. |
| 0:33.3 | Whenever I ask someone when they first encountered Mercury, almost immediately there's a slightly |
| 0:38.0 | guilty smile, glint that comes into their eyes as they think back. |
| 0:42.6 | But this mesmerizing metal is also very toxic. |
| 0:46.9 | Have you ever seen a miner who's become sick from Mercury? |
| 0:51.3 | Yes. |
| 0:52.8 | Penty of them. |
| 0:53.9 | People die from Mercury. Beautiful but Plenty of them. People died from Mercury. |
| 0:55.9 | Beautiful but deadly. |
| 0:57.7 | That is Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:03.3 | For the ancients, |
| 1:05.1 | Mercury was one of the most important |
| 1:07.2 | of all the elements, |
| 1:08.6 | the first matter from which all other metals were formed. |
| 1:12.5 | It's used in industry, in medicine. Many of us have some in the amalgam fillings in our teeth |
| 1:17.5 | and was also used in the dark art of alchemy. Yet Mercury is profoundly poisonous. Here's Business |
| 1:25.1 | Daily's chemist-in-chief, Professor Andrea Seller of University College London, |
| 1:30.0 | to explain what makes the metal so special and so very useful. |
| 1:35.2 | Mercury, or quicksilver, as it was called, is to me the most beautiful, but also the most feared of the elements. |
| 1:41.5 | And I've got here almost half a liter of it. |
| 1:44.1 | So you're passing over to me. |
... |
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