Re: How do you get mercury out of streams, lakes?

State and federal agencies to varying degrees are involved in cleaning up streams.

Decades of environmental litigation, regulations, Environmental Impact Statements, and projects are involved in the clean up. It is your army corp of engineers and the US military who are officially creating a database and assessment of all the stream, lake, and river conditions. So they also plan and implement the effects to ameliorate the toxicity.

In certain controlled situations, some sort of diversion or inflow of a cleaner fresher tributary would be used. In other conditions there are agents and natural mineral and stone deposits that can precipitate the mercury free flowing in water into much deeper unavailable sediment.

Primarily stream side management zones, forest protection, and soil erosion prevention are what are used to keep toxic runoff out of the streams. Given that measure, our water ways are a lot less assaulted with pollution than they were in the 60's and 70's.

However, given agricultural output - we still have a lot of problems, since it is considerably higher volume in pollution than the more stringently regulated industrial runoff.