From New York Times reporters By Peter S. Goodman, Will Fitzgibbon and Samuel Granados
Following the tradition of Upton Sinclair's 1906 classic gotcha expose "The Jungle", Goodman, Fitzgibbon, and Granados have found a very legitimate way to make environmentalists feel bad about recycled content in auto batteries.
Recycling Lead for U.S. Car Batteries Is Poisoning People
It's much easier for reporters to visit lead recycling operations than it is to visit the only alternative to recycled content lead batteries - which is lead batteries made from mining lead ore and smelting it in a huge primary lead smelter. The lead in an old car battery is 100% lead. The lead in virgin lead-zinc ore mined from mountains ranges from less than one percent to eight percent lead content.
Consequently (math!) primary lead smelters are about 25% larger / more active than secondary, or recycled, lead smelters. But the production of lead from virgin mining operations - like Perkoa in Burkina Faso, Africa - is really hard to get to, hard to photograph, and stays quiet, not claiming any environmental advantage.
So if the story was about nutrition, Goodman, Fizgibbon and Granados would be reporting on urban food coops, not on cannabilism, because it's going to grab the attention of NYTimes readers. That's very typical of journalism, and it has a value in forcing improvement at recycling facilities and urban food cooperatives. We appreciate criticism and the opportunity to improve.
But when not a word or sentence anywhere about the difference between mining and recycling lead acid batteries. Therefore, it is criminally negligent in context.
FACT: United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates 73% of USA auto batteries are recycled content rather than mined content.
Recycling: In 2019, about 1.2 million tons of secondary lead was produced, an amount equivalent to 73% of apparent domestic consumption. Nearly all secondary lead was recovered from old scrap, mostly lead-acid batteries. Import Sources (2015–18): Refined metal: Canada, 44%; Mexico, 18%; Republic of Korea, 17%; India, 5%; and other, 16%.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-lead.pdf
That's a lot of content right there in that paragraph. It leaves a lot of mental gymnastics to do to tie automobile scrap generated in Africa, removed in African scrap markets, smelted in African secondary smelters, and sold on the London Metals Exchange as metal, to responsibility to USA car manufacturers. #DataJournalism called, they want their focus back.
First, talk about the virgin mined lead that makes up the other 27% of what goes into our cars. Perkoa Mine had a fatal accident killing 8 miners three years ago. But there's no reporting by Goodman, Fitzgibbon and Granados about either the danger, the environmental damage, or the blood poisoning.
Recycling is Urban Mining, and Urban places are easier to report on than mines which tend to be invested in far from neighbors. There might be ten times more ore under the ground in Times Square NYC, but no one is ever going to open a toxic mine there. Similarly, secondary smelters are far more regulated than primary smelter because they are more often sited close to the urban populations that provide their raw material.
Second, look at the USGS ssources of the recycled lead content in USA cars. Canada, 44%; Mexico, 18%; Republic of Korea, 17%; India, 5%; and other, 16%
So the recycled lead from Africa may be somewhere in the 16%, or just as likely sold to India, which has a massive lead recycling capacity via firms like Gravita... which had a secondary lead battery recycling plant in Tema, Ghana which I tried to visit in 2017 - to see if they could piggy-back CRT glass out as fluxing agent for recycling at India's primary lead smelters, as we did at Retroworks de Mexico in Sonora, Mexico. As I blogged here a decade ago, the virgin mining in Sonora was visible from outer space, but our tiny electronics recycling (manual disassembly) was not... but the City of Tucson took away our contract after a councilperson suggested it MIGHT be polluting. (They instead went with an Arizona CRT recycling company that left all the shredded leaded CRT cullet outdoors in a yard in Phoenix after bankruptcy).
Now the images by do not look pretty. I would not want my kids working there and more than I'd like them to be working at the Perkoa Lead-zinc mine to the north (though it would be the preferable of the two if forced to choose).
But to tie these images to USA cars, NYT Goodman Fitzgibbon are making some major logical reaches to tie USA to these factories. Here are some of the fatal fallacies in the article.
"Lead is an essential element in car batteries. But mining and processing it is expensive. So companies have turned to recycling as a cheaper, seemingly sustainable source of this hazardous metal.
"As the United States tightened regulations on lead processing to protect Americans over the past three decades, finding domestic lead became a challenge. So the auto industry looked overseas to supplement its supply. In doing so, car and battery manufacturers pushed the health consequences of lead recycling onto countries where enforcement is lax, testing is rare and workers are desperate for jobs."
So the reporters come close here to explaining that virgin lead mining is really bad, but just say it is "expensive" without going into the details of the General Mining Act of 1872 or the bankruptcy of EPA Superfund by virgin hard rock mining, or comparing the environmental costs of mining vs recycling.
Then they have to explain how the auto industry "pushed the heal consequences of lead recycling onto countries where enforcment is lax."
Cities in Africa have TRAFFIC JAMS. It can take an hour to travel 5 miles in Nigeria or Ghana cities. The source of the batteries in the article are AFRICAN CITIES. The USA auto industry does NOT SHIP USED BATTERIES TO AFRICA TO BE RECYCLED!
So America's "complicity" is buying lead which is essential to car batteries. The lead is sold on the open metals market, and 73% of it is recycled content.
The recycling, mining, and all other raw material workplace standards have a lot of improvement to be made, and it would make a heck of a lot of sense to purchase more recycled lead from the two more properly regulated lead acid battery factories describe late at the end of the article (one invested in by Trafigura, a European raw material conglomerate that made clean recycling investments after suffering a Basel Convention dumping incident in Ivory Coast / Cote d'Ivoire in 2006 - also described a decade ago in this blog.
But to make this a "gotcha" headline that recycled content is bad? That's bad journalism.
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