Exporting Danger: Recycled Battery Lead Puts Mexicans in Danger
The spent batteries Americans turn in for recycling are increasingly being sent to Mexico, where their lead is often extracted by crude methods that are illegal in the United States, exposing plant workers and local residents to dangerous levels of a toxic metal.
The rising flow of batteries is a result of strict new Environmental Protection Agency standards on lead pollution, which make domestic recycling more difficult and expensive, but do not prohibit companies from exporting the work and the danger to countries where standards are low and enforcement is lax.
Mexican environmental officials acknowledge that they lack the money, manpower and technical capacity to police a fast-growing industry now operating in many parts of the country, often in dilapidated neighborhoods like the one here, 30 miles northwest of Mexico City.
Batteries are imported through official channels or smuggled in to satisfy a growing demand for lead, once cheap and readily available but now in short global supply. Lead batteries are crucial to cellphone towers, solar power arrays and the exploding Chinese car market, and the demand for lead has increased its fluctuating price as much as tenfold in a decade.
An analysis of trade statistics by The New York Times shows that nearly 20 percent of spent American vehicle and industrial batteries are now exported to Mexico, up from 6 percent in 2007. About 20 million such batteries will cross the border this year, according to United States trade statistics, and that does not take into account batteries smuggled in as mislabeled metal scrap or second-hand goods. In September, more than 60 18-wheelers full of old batteries crossed the border each day, American trade records show.
Spent batteries house up to 40 pounds of lead, a highly toxic metal that exposure can cause high blood pressure, kidney damage and abdominal pain in adults, and serious developmental delays and behavioral problems in young children because it interferes with neurologic development. When batteries are broken for recycling, the lead is released as dust and, during melting, as lead-laced emissions.