NYT "Recycling Lead for U.S. Car Batteries Is Poisoning People" Stretches the Truth Farther than it Should

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.

Pixelating the OECD and Non-OECD E-Waste Geography

I'm about to submerge into Mexico with some professors of history and geography.

The best way to visit the "fair trade recycling" concept will be with history, geography, and economics.  A lot has been written by OECD scholars about "converging markets" and "contract manufacturing".    The question is whether hand- disassembly recycling, repair, and reuse is a decent way to achieve environmental benefit, amd whether it can create sustainable jobs in poorer countries?

OECD lens of Penang, Singapore, and Borneo:  Basel Convention Chaos

My theory, which I've approached from many angles in 2011, is that there has to be something good in trade for two parties to agree to it, and to do it over and over.  If it's not all bad, then it needs to be reformed, not prohibited. Prohibitions and boycotts never work because they ignore supply/demand.

The "attractiveness" of the export boycott is to Americans with typical weakness in geography, math, science and history.  Ignorance lends us to bias.  We draw conclusions from photos.  We think that the entire south of Missouri is wiped off the map when we see homes destroyed by tornadoes in neighborhoods of Joplin.  We think that "non-OECD", plus or minus six billion people, is "primitive".  And if people invest capital around that misperception, they will tend to promote and market to it.

The unholy grail is to get the processes of your competitors declared illegal.  Selling CRTs to be rebuilt into TV/monitor combos?  There may not be any pollution to it, but if I'm running my CRTs through a shredder I bought, it's ok by me for your process to be called "illegal".  As Dilbert calls it, "Using the law to keep justice at bay."  Whether patent law or environmental law or export law, if there are lawyers there are interested parties.