That document turned out to be a very interesting, thorough read. I think it's more crazy that mercury is apparently still used in ritualistic/spiritual contexts.
That document says, "People often keep jars of mercury in their homes because they think that mercury is worth money, like liquid silver. In reality, mercury is nearly worthless, but the cleanup cost after a large spill easily can exceed the cost of a home."
As a point of comparison, copper is sufficiently expensive that people steal copper pipes and wires from unoccupied houses. Copper costs US$2.41/lb. (US$5.31/kg), less than 1% of the cost of mercury. The junk man in the slum where I'm going this afternoon will pay you AR$35/kg for it, which is US$2.23/kg, which is enough to incentivize the cartoneros to break the yokes off any CRT discarded on the street within hours. (He doesn't list a price for mercury on his sign.)
So "nearly worthless" seems like an exaggeration — mercury is worth more per liter than any other commodity substance you're likely to have in your house other than silver and Freon-22 — but it also doesn't seem like a really smart investment, especially if you have kids.
I'm not sure it's exaggeration. Who do you sell your jug of mercury to at $1850/flask...? Would any scientific or industrial consumer want to buy random flasks of unknown quality from laymen at fair prices? Just quoting bulk commodity prices for mercury is like noting that a particular diamond costs you $2k at the department store and assuming that you must then have an asset worth $2k.
Your analogy is a little off: $2k at the department store is not $2k in the Antwerp diamond markets. The USGS prices are for wholesale markets, not retail mercury.
The recycling shop in the slum has to deal with the same issues with the copper they handle. My price from his sign was out of date, perhaps due to our world-leading inflation: he pays AR$45 per kilo, which is US$2.87. The difference between that US$2.87/kg and the US$5.31/kg that CME copper contracts trade at is exactly the cost of converting random chunks of copper of unknown quality bought from laymen into copper acceptable to scientific and industrial consumers, plus his profit.
If you're not a neoliberal, you could reasonably argue that it's unfair that the junk man pays you only half of the bulk commodity price for your copper. This does not defeat the point that the price he pays is sufficient to motivate people to aggressively recycle copper. In fact, even the AR$8/kg he pays for aluminum is high enough that cartoneros remove heatsinks from discarded computers.
Maybe whoever handles mercury recycling in the US is willing to pay somewhere between 25% and 50% of the bulk commodity price for jugs of metallic mercury of unknown purity. In fact, maybe they'd be willing to pay even more: maybe removing the impurities from a kilogram of impure mercury only costs one to five times as much as removing the impurities from a kilogram of impure copper, not ten times as much. The USGS report I linked notes that more than 50 companies in the US currently collect mercury for recycling from "Mercury-containing automobile convenience switches, barometers, compact and traditional fluorescent lamps, computers, dental amalgam, medical devices, thermostats, and some mercury-containing toys," and even more companies collect metallic mercury.
…that said, my attempts to find offers in the US on the internet to buy mercury for recycling for anything approaching US$54/kg are not finding anything. At all. So maybe the EPA guy is, in practice, correct.
> $2k at the department store is not $2k in the Antwerp diamond markets. The USGS prices are for wholesale markets, not retail mercury.
A retail consumer investor, who is storing it in their home, is paying retail consumer prices. They aren't showing up at the cinnabar mines and tapping a spigot for bulk prices. My diamond analogy is exactly correct. That's why it's a scam: because you are paying inflated prices for something you cannot possibly sell at anything remotely like what you paid for it, and in the case of mercury, it's worse than if you bought some diamonds because at least diamonds aren't ticking timebombs.
you're saying you pay the spread because you're taking prices, not making them. diamonds have a huge spread at retail, and so you get screwed; gold's spread is so low that you can actually make money doing this, although more or less only by chance. i'd've expected mercury to be more like gold, but so far i can't find much evidence of a current functioning mercury market.
At least in the case of gold, there's a very large retail market with lots of connections to the investment market, and as far as I know, gold is easy & safe to store & refine, so if you sell some scrap gold to a gold dealer they don't have too much trouble refining it into something standardized. The rarer something is, and the more dangerous, the more you're going to pay in costs.
Basically I agree with everything you say, with one exception. There are many methods to refine gold, but none of them are particularly safe, involving, for example, the evaporation of substantial amounts of mercury, gold cyanidation (what Turing's mother believed killed him), chlorine gas, or boiling aqua regia. This kind of thing can be made safe, but it's even more difficult than making mercury processing safe.
So I suspect that the main issue is storage and transportation, not refinement.
