With Pact's Completion, The Real Work Begins

摘要

An elegant crematorium sits in a wooded cemetery here on the edge of the city. It once reduced corpses to ash. But government regulators shut it down not long ago, because its old-fashioned ovens couldn't prevent toxic mercury in the dental fillings of the dead from wafting into the atmosphere, and ultimately falling back to Earth and threatening the living. Thousands of similar crematoria, and countless other industrial sources of mercury, could eventually face similar regulation as a result of the Minamata Convention on Mercury to be finalized in Japan next month.