By Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times, December 8, 2011
NAUCALPAN DE
JUÁREZ, Mexico — 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 networks, solar power arrays and the exploding Chinese
car market, and the demand for lead has increased as much as tenfold in a
decade.
An analysis of
trade statistics by The New York Times shows that about 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, trade records show.
Spent batteries
house up to 40 pounds of lead, which 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 neurological development.
When batteries are broken for recycling, the lead is released as dust and,
during melting, as lead-laced emissions.
Lead battery
recyclers in the United States now operate in sealed, highly mechanized plants
— like labs working with dangerous germs. Their smokestacks are fitted with
scrubbers, and their perimeters are surrounded by lead-monitoring devices.
But for much of the
past decade, at the vast recycling compound of Industrial Mondelo here,
batteries have been dismantled by men wielding hammers, and their lead melted
in furnaces whose smokestacks vent to the air outside, where lead particles can
settle everywhere from schoolyards to food carts. Officials of the plant, which
has been given more than a dozen citations and fines for lead emissions and improper
storage of dangerous materials, did not respond to repeated requests for
comment.
The recycling
factory has put a neighborhood of children at serious risk of lead exposure,
said Marisa Jacott, director of Fronteras Comunes, an environmental group in
Mexico City. Ms. Jacott wants to test young residents living near the plant but
lacks the money to do so. The town’s elementary school is on the same block as
the recycling plant, which recently moved the bulk of its operations to a
larger facility elsewhere. Lead pollution remains in the ground for decades.
A sample of soil
collected by The Times in the schoolyard showed a lead level of 2,000 parts per
million, five times the limit for children’s play areas in the United States
set by the Environmental Protection Agency. In most states, that would rate as
a “significant environmental lead hazard” and require immediate remediation,
like covering the area with concrete or disposing of the soil.
“If we export, we
should only be sending batteries to countries with standards as strict as ours,
and in Mexico that is not the case,” said Perry Gottesfeld, executive director
of Occupational Knowledge International, a San
Francisco group devoted to reducing lead exposure.
One Border, 2
Standards
While Mexico does
have some regulation for smelting and recycling lead, the laws are poorly
enforced and even licensed plants are allowed to release about 20 times as much
lead as their American equivalents, said Mr. Gottesfeld, who has studied the
export trade.
Some American
companies recycling in Mexico say that they already exceed that country’s
requirements and that they intend to bring their Mexican plants up to American
standards. But there is no way to ensure that will happen. The E.P.A. says it
“does not inspect, monitor or verify the Mexican facilities.”
Which is why
doctors and teachers in Mexico are demanding testing in a country that has
little or none. At her community clinic on the outskirts of Guadalajara, Dr.
Lourdes Pérez Ramírez said that she routinely saw children with seriously
delayed development and that she was convinced that lead poisoning from a
nearby recycling plant might play a role, although she cannot prove it, because
studies have not been done. “I think there is danger from the lead,” she said,
“but to find it you have to look. You have to look!”
Although lead
batteries have long been classified as hazardous waste, the E.P.A. only last
year began requiring that American companies report their exports — but
already, even that minimal system is not achieving the agency’s goal of safer
recycling. Exporters must estimate how many batteries they intend to transfer
out of the country in the coming year and specify the recipient plant. That
paperwork is sent to Semarnat, the Mexican counterpart to the E.P.A., which is
responsible for accepting or rejecting the shipments. In 2010, Semarnat never
refused.
Then each March,
American companies are supposed to tally how many batteries were actually sent,
but this year only 3 out of 10 exporters complied.
The E.P.A. declined
to speak publicly on the export trade, instead explaining in a statement that
its role was “limited to processing” the paperwork for the new battery tracking
system.
Many people
familiar with the industry said more needed to be done.
“We’re shipping
hazardous waste to a neighbor ill equipped to process it and we’re doing it
legally, turning our heads, and pretending it’s not a problem,” said Robert
Finn, chief executive of RSR, a Dallas-based lead recycler that operates solely
in the United States, and is concerned about the loss of raw materials to
Mexico.
Sergio Herrera,
deputy director for industrial inspection at the Mexican legal agency that
oversees environmental compliance, known as Profepa, said regulating the
battery trade was an “important priority,” but early efforts to control it have
mostly exposed the daunting size of the task. A recent government survey found
that 19 of 20 recycling plants did not have proper authorization for importing
dangerous waste, including batteries. And a retrospective review of truck
manifests turned up 142 illegal shipments containing millions of spent car
batteries that had not been detected at the border.
Acumuladores de
Jalisco, the recycling plant near Dr. Pérez Ramírez’s clinic, operates without
the proper authorization to recycle imports and when it was last inspected in
2006, was found to lack storage for even “one fifth of the hazardous waste it
generates.” Yet there is no record of any fine, or follow-up, which Mr. Herrera
called “a deficiency on our part in not verifying our procedures.” The recycler
did not respond to repeated interview requests.
Along the border,
where American vigilance focuses on drugs and illegal immigrants, there is
little effort to stanch the flow, with the Customs and Border Protection agency
dealing “mostly with imports,” said Erlinda Byrd, an agency spokeswoman, though
she noted there had been some spot checks for illegal waste exports. This year,
the Mexican government trained more than 200 of its border agents on better
detection of illegal shipments of batteries and other electronic waste.
But most illegal
activity is discovered by accident: the criminal division of the E.P.A. says it
has recently opened investigations into three cases of illegal battery exports,
the first such cluster. All resulted from tips, often from American companies
trying to operate within government rules, agency officials said.
In Mexico, a truck
from Texas was impounded in October after a border agent
noticed it was dripping acid. It contained 1,800 spent batteries. The truck’s
paperwork indicated that it was heading for a licensed recycler, but the driver
told the police he was really taking it elsewhere. Another case involved 22.5
tons of batteries sent from Texas whose lead had already been resold to buyers
in China.
The amount of lead
shipped from Mexico to China has nearly tripled in three years to an estimated
150 million tons in 2011, according to government trade statistics. Mexico’s
production of lead from mining has increased only minimally since 2007.
‘A Putrid Mist’
Chronic lead
poisoning in children is hard to diagnose because the symptoms are fairly
common, among them low I.Q. and attention issues. Without blood test results, a
definitive diagnosis is impossible. Few labs in Mexico offer lead testing and
the cost — about $100 — is beyond the reach of poor families.
After Mariel
Landeros developed seizures last year in her first months of life, her family
worried that the battery recycling plant across from her home in Naucalpan de
Juárez was to blame.
Industrial Mondelo
has been recycling batteries for nearly a decade, but production has grown
manyfold in the last few years. “As soon as they started, there was a putrid
mist over the town,” said Mariel’s aunt, Irma Landeros Aguirre.
She had become
increasingly concerned about the problems of her own daughter, Krystell, now
16, who suffered from nosebleeds and stomachaches, and lagged years behind her
peers in school. Krystell had been referred for tests and was on a medley of
drugs to control her behavior. But she had never had her blood tested for lead.
So when the baby
exhibited serious neurological problems, the family visited the National
Institute of Pediatrics in Mexico City. Mariel’s first test came back at 18.4
micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood when she was 2 months old, well above
what doctors consider safe for children. At 4 months, the level had gone up to
24.8. The doctor prescribed powerful medicine to bind the lead in her body so
that it can be cleaned out by her kidneys.
According to the
United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Blood lead levels of
10 micrograms per deciliter of blood in young children can result in lowered
intelligence, reading and learning disabilities, impaired hearing, reduced
attention span, hyperactivity and antisocial behavior.” An advisory task force
in the United States has recommended remediation for children to 5
micrograms.
It is difficult to
prove that lead battery recycling is the culprit in any one poisoning case,
because there are other sources of lead exposure, like lead-based paint or
ceramic pottery. But performing crude battery recycling close to where people
live is a frightening combination, experts say.
Outside
Acumuladores de Jalisco, the recycler at the edge of Guadalajara, open-air
restaurants and a farmers’ market sidle up to the factory’s dirty brick wall.
Fruits and vegetables are piled on crates and children play on the ground. A
sample of that dirt tested at an accredited lab in the United States contained
a lead level of 485 parts per million, a rate unsafe for play areas, let alone
food handling.
Lead Is Gold
The American car
battery industry likes to boast that it has the highest recycling rate for any
commodity — 97 percent of the lead is recycled — and most states have laws
mandating that stores take back old batteries. Whether deposited at the store
where they were purchased or with a local mechanic, used batteries are
redirected to recycling plants, where the real goal is not environmental
stewardship but extracting the precious lead that is the gold of a protean
trading system where traceability is impossible.
The provenance of
any one battery is hard to ascertain because big stores like AutoZone and
Wal-Mart put their own brand names on batteries that may be manufactured by
various companies. Similarly, some large battery manufacturers like Johnson
Controls and Exide Technologies take back their batteries and operate
some recycling plants themselves. But they sometimes send batteries out to external
recyclers, and buy lead from these outside recyclers for their battery-making
operations.
At some point in
their existence many used batteries are sold to middlemen who ship or sell them
for lead extraction to the cheapest processor — increasingly, in Mexico,
despite the transport cost — so the lead can be reused or resold. The price of
lead scrap sold on trading Web sites has varied from 25 to 40 cents a pound in
the past year, up from 5 cents a pound a decade ago. The lower the cost to
extract the lead, the bigger the profit — a reality, experts say, that
encourages smuggling and has fueled a black market in batteries.
Federico Magalini,
a researcher at the United Nations University who is trying to quantify the
illegal lead trade, said batteries were ideal for smuggling because — unlike
bulky refrigerators or computer monitors —they are compact and loaded with
lead. “If you want to make a lot of money you can just smash the plastics,
throw the acid wherever you want, and sell the lead at a high price,” he said.
But the increasing
export of lead batteries has hobbled many American recyclers, especially
smaller players, who now say they have only enough spent batteries to run one
shift a day, resulting in layoffs. “Our industry is built on the ability to
keep that material here,” said Bruce Cole, executive vice president, strategy
and business development, of Exide, one of the largest domestic manufacturers
and recyclers.
Already hurt by the
recession, American recyclers are now also
suffering from the cost of tougher regulation. The E.P.A. has reduced allowable
lead levels in both smokestack emissions and ambient air by a staggering amount
in the last three years because of a growing appreciation of the devastating
effect that even low levels of lead have on health. American recyclers estimate
the cost of compliance for a typical plant at $20 million.
Companies are being
forced to make difficult decisions.
Exide, which has
five recycling plants in the United States, does no recycling in Mexico,
according to Mr. Cole, who said it was “not in our interest” to “skirt
regulations.”
Some battery
brokers have begun trucking their goods to independent smelters south of the
border instead of to American plants.
Johnson Controls,
the Milwaukee-based battery giant, trucked hundreds of thousands of spent
batteries to its own recycling plant in Mexico last year, according to E.P.A.
export notices. The company runs one licensed recycling plant in Mexico and is
completing construction of a second; it is also building a new recycling plant
in South Carolina.
Alex Molinaroli, a
senior executive at Johnson Controls, said its plants in Mexico far exceeded
that country’s regulatory standards and that they would be upgraded to meet the
new American standards when they take full effect in 2013. “We don’t have a
Mexican standard or a U.S. standard or a German standard,” he said. “We have
our one standard globally, which today is being driven by the E.P.A.”
Although Johnson
Controls has won praise from the E.P.A. for environmental innovation in the
United States, its Mexican recycling plant does not face the same regulatory
scrutiny.
Working in the Dark
Mexico does have
some regulations governing lead exposure, and many plants hire doctors to
monitor lead in the blood of workers. But the results are not made public or
even disclosed to the workers themselves. If the levels come back high,
employees are sent home for several days with an analgesic for the bone pain
that typically accompanies adult lead poisoning, said Ms. Jacott, of Fronteras
Comunes, who has spent two years interviewing workers. There are no
requirements for monitoring lead levels beyond the factory.
Residents who live near
the Acumuladores de Jalisco plant said they had been told by the government
that the ground water was contaminated with lead, and they tick off maladies
they attribute to lead exposure.
The men who
disassemble the batteries end each shift covered in dust from their work and
must shower and change before they leave, said the wife of one worker, who said
that the factory doctor took good care of the men. “Anyway,” she said, “there
are not many other jobs around here.”
Environmental
advocates and domestic recyclers say the onus should be on the United States to
make sure its old batteries do not become Mexico’s health problem. Some say a
system is needed for inspecting foreign recyclers so they can be held to
American standards. But one group, Slab Watchdog, has called on companies like
Wal-Mart — which sells a huge share of the nation’s batteries and prides itself
on environmentally friendly operations — to guarantee that their batteries are
recycled domestically.
The company’s spent
batteries, a spokeswoman said, now go to Johnson Controls — the company that
last year sent by far the most batteries to Mexico.
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