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.

Memorial Day: Fear and Greed, Part 2

EPA tried to simplify things a few decades ago with a "Solid Waste Hierarchy".  The first was "recycle, then incinerate, then landfill".   That drew an environmentalist backlash, and the "new hierarchy" in 1990 Earth Day was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle".  Neither hierarchy anticipated the international trade issues and controversies.

Reuse and repair beats recycling.  Ghettos and barrios are the best places for that work... Just as auto and engine repair is no longer done in Manhattan.  But that collides with a social fairness "tab" we have open, and in the late 1990s "Environmental Justice" became EPA's forray into social issues.


Definitions from wikipedia 2012.05.27

The United States Environmental Protection Agency defines EJ as follows:

Environmental Justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. EPA has this goal for all communities and persons across this Nation [sic]. It will be achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work.^[5]

In other words, this environmental outcome concerned the human perception of environmental risk... people who were poor had the same vote on EPA attention as the rich people.  A clean and safe environment was seen as a human right, a protection of people.

The attention of government regulatory staff was to be divided equally, to protect us all.  This shifted the radius or loci of EPA from protecting high property values to protecting humans equally.

In this paradigm, the value of protecting the environment is utilitarian.  How many people are in contact with the environment being protected?

This is not a song for the woods, or rain forests.  It's only the giving that makes you what you are.