A person from Suceava who had two mercury thermometers called the Inspectorate for Emergency Situations, the Directorate of Public Health, Prefecture, and even the National Agency for Environmental Protection in Bucharest to ask how he could legally get rid of them. In the end, the answer was that he had to use a specialized sanitation service, authorized for hazardous waste, but there is no such authorized service in Suceava. The criminal code says that you are liable to imprisonment from 2 to 7 years for possession and trafficking of toxic products or substances if you have a mercury thermometer at home.
thermometer with mercury Photo: Anton Veselov / Alamy / Alamy / Profimedia
“In the 1950s, my parents bought a medical thermometer. A few years ago it was taken out of service because the back of the thermometer was broken. There is a risk of the capillary breaking, with the consequence of contaminating the house. Meanwhile, I had another Russian thermometer, non-medical, at a thermal plant, good until it partially broke. I tried, over the course of several days, to solve the problem of taking over the grams of poisonous mercury. I have called multiple places but no luck. The problem turned out to be a tough one,” said the Sucean for The monitor of Suceava.
Aware of the danger represented by mercury, he stored outside the house, in a well-ventilated shed, the two non-functional thermometers, enclosed in cardboard tubes on which he wrote “Caution, mercury! Toxic”.
Then he looked for a company that collects toxic waste in Suceava. He didn’t find it and called the National Environmental Protection Agency in Bucharest, where a clerk told him she would look for a solution and get back. He looked for him the next day, with the following recommendations: to look for a sanitation operator, to contact the ISU or the local administration.
“I called the Environmental Protection Department again, but this time to the local agency,” said the Suceava resident. From here he was suggested to look for a specialized sanitation operator. “At Demeco Bacău they said that they do not collect such waste, at Setcar Brăila, which neutralizes waste, no one answered.”
The next step was to call ISU.
“The officer on duty said that if it’s not a threat, they don’t have a mandate to intervene and they don’t collect hazardous material.”
No sanitation company is authorized for hazardous waste in Suceava
The manager of the sanitation company Ritmic Suceava, Costel Corneanu, said that in Suceava county no sanitation company is authorized for hazardous waste and immediately indicated a specialized company from Bacău.
Monitorul de Suceava called the respective company, Igiena Serv SRL, and the call center operator, Leonard Mihai, informed that the thermometers can be picked up at any time from the owner, regardless of the locality, against the cost: 190 lei/piece, plus VAT.
So to get rid of the two thermometers, it would cost our Sucean around 400 lei.
“It’s money that I don’t have at the moment. I have a child that I support in college. When I am more financially powerful, I will call the company in Bacău and solve the problem”, said the man.
Finally, at the end of two days of countless phone calls, with the help of the president of the College of Pharmacists – Suceava branch, Doinita Cocriș, the newspaper found an independent pharmacy, authorized to accept hazardous waste, which agreed to safely store the two mercury thermometers, until the law enforcement rules regarding the waste regime, published in the Official Gazette in January 2023, appear.
In pharmacies, there is a new law from 2023 regarding the receipt and storage of dangerous substances in the medical field, but it does not yet have application rules.
Police: “Simply possessing a mercury thermometer is a crime”
The head of the Weapons, Explosives and Dangerous Substances Service, chief commissioner Gabriel Gheorghe Panțiru, told Monitorul de Suceava that, since 2014, “the simple possession of a mercury thermometer is a crime”, according to art. 359 of the Criminal Code.
Persons found to possess or transport mercury will be charged with the crime of possession and trafficking of toxic products or substances.
For this crime, the prescribed punishment is imprisonment from 2 to 7 years.
Therefore, if the man from Suceava went to the Police with the two thermometers, the police would have opened a criminal case for the investigation of the crime of possession of dangerous substances. Moreover, according to the “polluter pays” principle, man would have been obliged to pay the cost of neutralizing the hazardous substance waste.
In 2022, a woman from Ploiești was charged with a criminal case for trafficking in toxic products or substances, after a woman notified the authorities that she had broken a mercury thermometer in her home, according to realitateadeprahova.net.
2023-09-30 18:10:00
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