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Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future by James Morton Turner has been shortlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize.
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The largest foreign destination for spent US batteries has been Mexico. Exports surged from 4,300 metric tons of lead in 2000 to 200,000 metric tons of lead in 2010. Secondary smelter shutdowns in places like Pennsylvania, Texas, and the Exide smelter in California likely contributed to the growing transboundary trade. Johnson Controls’ acquisition of two Mexican smelters in the early twenty-first century, contributed to the surge of battery exports. Johnson Controls, the largest domestic lead-acid battery manufacturer at the time, described their acquisitions as part of a strategy to shore up their access to recycled lead. Many observers, however, including those in the lead industry, environmental health advocates, and economists, viewed the shift to Mexico as a race to the bottom driven by trade liberalization.
Under the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, member nations were encouraged to meet the same science-based occupational health and environmental standards. But that requirement was unevenly enforced. Mexican standards for lead were lower and less thorough than those in the United States: occupational exposure limits were three times the US standard (150 µg/m3 ); ambient pollution levels were 1.5 µg/m3 (the same as the US standard prior to 2008); and worker blood lead levels were unregulated. The New York Times reported in 2011 that the “rising flow of batteries is a result of strict new Environmental Protection Agency standards on lead pollution,” which made it more expensive to recycle in the United States while doing nothing to prevent “exporting the work and the danger to countries where standards are low and enforcement is lax.”
Public health activists led by US-based OK International and Mexico-based Fronteras Comunes succeeded in drawing substantial attention to the issue of lead-acid battery exports in the early 2000s. Their goal was a ban on exports. The NAFTA-created Commission for Environmental Cooperation undertook an in-depth investigation, faulting the weak regulatory standards in Mexico. US-based secondary lead smelters voiced objections to the exports: “Every day that scrap batteries are exported from the U.S. to Mexico and other nations is another day that the U.S. poisons our neighbors’ children.” Public health economists documented a relationship between the increase in lead exports to Mexico and poor health outcomes for Mexican children living in proximity to the smelters. Yet, the public pressure succeeded only in improving regulations for documenting the trade in spent lead-acid batteries, not imposing limits on such exports.
Lead’s toll is measured in diminished mental capacity and chronic health ailments that last a lifetime.
The most troubling fate of lead-acid batteries is the one that is hardest to follow: the flow of batteries to countries least well-equipped to recycle them safely. Compared to the volume of batteries recycled domestically or the volume of batteries exported to Mexico, the percentage of US batteries that go to recycling operations in other countries is relatively small. Yet, around the world, informal recycling operations, where lead batteries are smelted in open barrels or rudimentary furnaces, remain common. The small scale of such operations, their wide distribution, and the rapidity with which they are erected and dismantled means there is no comprehensive information about the informal lead-processing industry.
Such sites often draw attention only in moments of crisis. For instance, in the 1990s, a lead smelter near the port of Haina in the Dominican Republic resulted in an epidemic of local lead poisoning, with more than 90 percent of nearby residents testing above accepted levels. The site was described as the Dominican Chernobyl. In 2007, World Health Organization authorities became aware of an epidemic of lead poisoning outside Dakar, Senegal. Locals had been collecting lead fragments leftover in the sandy soil from battery recycling operations. Children often played in the sand. Sometimes adults brought soil to their homes to sieve and bag. Such activities resulted in lead exposure connected to the deaths of eighteen children in 2007 and 2008. In 2015, Phyllis Omido, a Kenyan, was awarded the Goldman Prize for environmental activism in recognition of her efforts to close a secondary lead smelter that operated with few precautions and sickened her son and her community. She was jailed for her efforts and violently attacked by two armed men. Ultimately, she was successful, forcing the closure of the smelter in March 2014.
When the consequences of such small-scale and unregulated lead recycling operations are factored in, the global consequences of recycling lead-acid batteries are astounding. Jack Caravanos, a professor of public health and lead researcher at the Blacksmith Institute, warned that “lead poisoning from improper automotive battery recycling activities is the number one childhood environmental health threat globally.” In few cases does the exposure result in death. Instead, lead’s toll is measured in diminished mental capacity and chronic health ailments that last a lifetime. It is estimated that one in three children worldwide suffer from elevated blood lead levels. Researchers surveying the literature on exposure from sites of lead pollution identified metal foundries and battery recycling as “more than likely some of the major contributors to hotspot lead poisoning worldwide.” And as the use of lead-acid batteries in many countries continues to grow, to service electric bikes, for small-scale power backup for solar arrays, and for automobiles, the challenges of safely managing lead-acid batteries at end of life are likely only to grow.
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From Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future by James Morton Turner. Copyright © 2023. Available from University of Washington Press.
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Publish date : 2023-10-06 03:00:00
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