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.<p>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  My price from his sign was out of date, perhaps due to our world-leading inflation: he pays AR$45 per kilo, which is US$2.87.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&#x2F;kg and the US$5.31&#x2F;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.<p>If you&#x27;re not a neoliberal, you could reasonably argue that it&#x27;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&#x2F;kg he pays for aluminum is high enough that <i>cartoneros</i> remove heatsinks from discarded computers.<p>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&#x27;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 &quot;Mercury-containing automobile convenience switches, barometers, compact and traditional fluorescent lamps, computers, dental amalgam, medical devices, thermostats, and some mercury-containing toys,&quot; and even more companies collect metallic mercury.<p>…that said, my attempts to find offers in the US on the internet to buy mercury for recycling for anything approaching US$54&#x2F;kg are not finding anything.  At all.  So maybe the EPA guy is, in practice, correct.