620. Eugenics Board of North Carolina: It Is Pay-Up Time for Forced Sterilization

By Kim Severson, The New York Times, December 8, 2011

The Eugenics Board of North Carolina sterilized
Charles Holt when he was a teenager.

LINWOOD, N.C. — Charles Holt, 62, spreads a cache of vintage government records across his trailer floor. They are the stark facts of his state-ordered sterilization.

The reports begin when he was barely a teenager, fighting at school and masturbating openly. A social worker wrote that he and his parents were of “rather low mentality.” Mr. Holt was sent to a state home for people with mental and emotional problems. In 1968, when he was ready to get out and start life as an adult, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina ruled that he should first have a vasectomy.

A social worker convinced his mother it was for the best.

“We especially emphasized that it was a way of protecting Charles in case he were falsely accused of having fathered a child,” the social worker wrote to the board.

Now, along with scores of others selected for state sterilization — among them uneducated young girls who had been raped by older men, poor teenagers from large families, people with epilepsy and those deemed to be too “feeble-minded” to raise children — Mr. Holt is waiting to see what a state that had one of the country’s most aggressive eugenics programs will decide his fertility was worth.

Although North Carolina officially apologized in 2002 and legislators have pressed to compensate victims before, a task force appointed by Gov. Bev Perdue is again wrestling with the state’s obligation to the estimated 7,600 victims of its eugenics program.

The board operated from 1933 to 1977 as an experiment in genetic engineering once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool.

Thirty-one other states had eugenics programs. Virginia and California each sterilized more people than North Carolina. But no program was more aggressive.

Only North Carolina gave social workers the power to designate people for sterilization. They often relied on I.Q. tests like those done on Mr. Holt, whose scores reached 73. But for some victims who often spent more time picking cotton than in school, the I.Q. tests at the time were not necessarily accurate predictors of capability. For example, as an adult Mr. Holt held down three jobs at once, delivering newspapers, working at a grocery store and doing maintenance for a small city.

Wealthy businessmen, among them James Hanes, the hosiery magnate, and Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, drove the eugenics movement. They helped form the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1947, and found a sympathetic bureaucrat in Wallace Kuralt, the father of the television journalist Charles Kuralt.

A proponent of birth control in all forms, Mr. Kuralt used the program extensively when he was director of the Mecklenburg County welfare department from 1945 to 1972. That county had more sterilizations than any other in the state.

Over all, about 70 percent of the North Carolina operations took place after 1945, and many of them were on poor young women and racial minorities. Nonwhite minorities made up about 40 percent of those sterilized, and girls and women about 85 percent.

The program, while not specifically devised to target racial minorities, affected black Americans disproportionately because they were more often poor and uneducated and from large rural families.

“The state owes something to the victims,” said Governor Perdue, who campaigned on the issue.

But what? Her five-member task force has been meeting since May to try to determine what that might be. A final report is due in February.

This week, the task force set some priorities. Money was the most important thing to offer victims, followed by mental health services.

How much to pay is a vexing question, and what North Carolina does will be closely watched by officials in other states. In a period of severe budget cuts and layoffs, money for eugenics victims can be a hard sell to legislators.

States began practicing eugenics in earnest in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s, driven by a philosophy of social engineering once so popular that President Woodrow Wilson, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the Supreme Court and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, were ardent supporters.

Before most of the programs were closed down, more than 60,000 people nationwide had been sterilized by state order.

The reasons were chilling, reports from state records and interviews with survivors and researchers show.

There was a 14-year-old girl deemed low-performing and “oversexed” who came from a home with poor housekeeping standards. A man who raped his daughter at 12 signed her sterilization consent when she was 16 and pregnant. A mother of five was deemed to have a low I.Q.

Victims began filing a handful of lawsuits in the 1970s, but outrage has been slow to build. In 2002, The Winston-Salem Journal ran a series of articles on eugenics, prompting official apologies and initial legislative efforts aimed at compensating victims.

But nothing came of it until Governor Perdue, a Democrat, took up the cause. She has vowed to put money in the 2012 budget. The House speaker, Thom Tillis, a Republican, said in October that he, too, would work on a bill to compensate victims.

But how much to include? Is $20,000 per victim, a figure suggested by some, enough?

“How can you quantify how much a baby is worth to people?” asked Charmaine Fuller Cooper, executive director of the North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation, which is financed by the state. “It’s not about quantifying the unborn child, it’s about the choices that were taken away.”

The issues go deeper than just a dollar amount. The task force has to decide whether money should go only to those living or to the estates of the dead, whether a tubal ligation is worth more than a vasectomy.

One variable is how many people will actually sign up to get the money. The state estimates that about 3,000 victims of state-mandated sterilizations may still be alive. Of those, 68 have been verified in state records. But not all sterilizations were done through the state board. Counties had programs, as did private doctors who were part of the eugenics movement. Those people will not qualify for state compensation, Ms. Fuller Cooper said.

Still, her office in Raleigh receives about 200 calls a month. People who suspect they were part of the state program must send her a notarized letter. Then, their names have to be found among eugenics board records stored in dozens of cardboard boxes in the basement of the state archives. People have died or moved or use different names. It is needle-in-a-haystack work.

Some critics of the effort say the state is not working hard enough. Victims and others argue that names in the archives could be matched to drivers’ records.

But the state cannot just send letters to people’s houses suggesting they might have been sterilized against their will, Ms. Fuller Cooper said. Medical records are private. Husbands or adopted children could find out a long-buried secret. Old wounds could be laid open again.

Even people who call her office sometimes hang up abruptly when a spouse approaches, wanting to keep their terrible secret unless money is on the table.

“Until folks know what the state’s going to do, people aren’t going to take the risk and come forward,” she said.

One woman who submitted her name fears it will become public. In a recent interview in her small home in Lexington, N.C., she said she would be embarrassed if her co-workers at a local hospital knew her story.

Now 62, she was adopted but sent to a state school at 7 because her parents thought she was mentally deficient. She remembers being told as a teenager that she was getting an appendectomy. When she was 27 and started having uterine trouble, a doctor requested her records and discovered that she had been sterilized in an operation that had been botched, her medical records show.

“I tell you what,” she said. “I about hit the floor.”

She went to her mother, who said she was going to tell her before she got married. Welfare would have ended if she had not consented, her mother said.

She did marry, and her husband, who has since died, accepted the fact that they could not have children. Still, she was forever changed.

“I see people with babies and I think how much I would have loved to have a young one,” she said. “It should have been my choice whether I wanted to have a baby or not. You just feel like you were held back, like you never had any say in your life.”

She figures what she went through is worth at least $50,000 or $100,000. “Maybe I could retire,” she said.

Mr. Holt still remembers that October day. He thought he was getting an examination so he could leave the state home. He said he did not know he was giving up his chance to be a parent.

“The doctor told me I couldn’t go home unless I had an operation done,” said Mr. Holt, who was 19 at the time. “When I woke up I tried to walk, and I said: ‘This ain’t right. I don’t even remember them shaving me down there.’ ”

He went on to marry and divorce. Now recovering from a stroke and surviving on disability payments, he lives with relatives in a tidy trailer park in the middle of the state.

He thinks maybe $30,000 would be enough. Others want more. Elaine Riddick, 57, who also lives in Atlanta, was sterilized in 1967. She was 14 and had gotten pregnant from a rape. Social workers persuaded her illiterate grandmother to sign the consent form with an X.

She has become the most vocal proponent of payment, suing the state for $1 million. Her case was appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which refused to hear it.

For Nial Ramirez, 65, who was sterilized at 18 after she gave birth to her daughter, no amount could make it right.

A social worker from the Washington County Department of Public Welfare suggested that she get sterilized. Mrs. Ramirez said she did not understand that the procedure was permanent and thought she had no choice.

“They told me that my brothers and sisters were going to be in the streets all because of you,” she said. “It’s either sign the paper or mama’s checks get cut off.”

In 1973, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, she became the first person to file a lawsuit against the state eugenics board. It ended with a $7,000 settlement from the doctor, she said.

Now in a small apartment surrounded by the sound of the television and some of the 200 dolls she has collected through her lifetime, Ms. Ramirez remains angry. She does not want an apology, and she will not settle for the amounts being discussed.

“What would an apology do for me?” she said. “You don’t know what my kids were going to be. You don’t know what kids God was going to give me. Twenty thousand dollars ain’t gonna do it, honey.”

619. Thinking Outside the Box: To Fix Health, Help the Poor

A welfare line in New Jersey

By Elizabeth H. Bradley and Lauren Taylor, The New York Times, December 8, 2011

IT’S common knowledge that the United States spends more than any other country on health care but still ranks in the bottom half of industrialized countries in outcomes like life expectancy and infant mortality. Why are these other countries beating us if we spend so much more? The truth is that we may not be spending more — it all depends on what you count.

In our comparative study of 30 industrialized countries, published earlier this year in the journal BMJ Quality and Safety, we broadened the scope of traditional health care industry analyses to include spending on social services, like rent subsidies, employment-training programs, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, family support and other services that can extend and improve life.

We studied 10 years’ worth of data and found that if you counted the combined investment in health care and social services, the United States no longer spent the most money — far from it. In 2005, for example, the United States devoted only 29 percent of gross domestic product to health and social services combined, while countries like Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark dedicated 33 percent to 38 percent of their G.D.P. to the combination. We came in 10th.

What’s more, America is one of only three industrialized countries to spend the majority of its health and social services budget on health care itself. For every dollar we spend on health care, we spend an additional 90 cents on social services. In our peer countries, for every dollar spent on health care, an additional $2 is spent on social services. So not only are we spending less, we’re allocating our resources disproportionately on health care.

Our study found that countries with high health care spending relative to social spending had lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than countries that favored social spending. While the stagnating life expectancy in the United States remains at 78 years, in many European countries it has leapt to well over 80 years, and several countries boast infant mortality rates approximately half of ours. In a national survey conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, four out of five physicians agreed that unmet social needs led directly to worse health.

Unfortunately, instead of learning from countries like Sweden and France, we prefer the frantic scramble to recover money from one part of the health care system only to reallocate it toward retreads of previously failed reforms. We pretend that the fresh schemes are innovative, but they are usually long on promises, short on details and often marked with an annoying acronym: H.M.O., F.S.A., A.C.O. and so forth.

It’s time to think more broadly about where to find leverage for achieving a healthier society. One way would be to invest more heavily in social services. This may be difficult for many Americans to swallow as it suggests a potentially expanded role for government. Out of respect for individuals’ rights, our current social programs are mostly opt-in, leaving holes for the undocumented, uneducated and unemployed to slip through cracks and become acutely ill. Emergency rooms, though, are not allowed to opt out of providing these people extraordinarily expensive medical treatment before discharging them back to wretched conditions and their inevitable return to the E.R.

The impact of sub-par social conditions on health has been well documented. Homelessness isn’t typically thought of as a medical problem, but it often precludes good nutrition, personal hygiene and basic first aid, and it increases the risks of frostbite, leg ulcers, upper respiratory infections and trauma from muggings, beatings and rape. The Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program tracked the medical expenses of 119 chronically homeless people for several years. In one five-year period, the group accounted for 18,834 emergency room visits estimated to cost $12.7 million.

We can learn from the star pupils in our analysis. Other countries have created government ministries that marry health and social care. Earlier this year, the Department of Health in Britain released plans to create health and well-being boards comprising local government representatives, primary care physicians, hospital administrators, children and adult-services specialists and public health directors, who will coordinate care for their constituencies across the health and social care spectrum. We should think expansively about how to construct similar programs that enable much needed integration of these mutually dependent sectors. The Department of Veterans Affairs is leading the way, with programs called “stand downs” that simultaneously address the health and social needs of retired service members.

It is Americans’ prerogative to continually vote down the encroachment of government programs on our free-market ideology, but recognizing the health effects of our disdain for comprehensive safety nets may well be the key to unraveling the “spend more, get less” paradox. Before we spend even more money, we should consider allocating it differently.

Elizabeth H. Bradley is professor of public health at Yale and faculty director of its Global Health Leadership Institute, where Lauren Taylor is a program manager.

618. U.S. Used Batteries Dumped in Mexico, Causing Lead Poisoning

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.

617. Climate Change: Europe's Emissions Reduction Fallacy

Reduction of emissions in Europe does not account for imports,
including from China, the world leading polluter by tonnage

By Julio Godoy, IPS, December 8, 2011

BERLIN- According to official figures, the European Union member countries have successfully reduced their emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), especially of carbon dioxide (CO2), by more than 15 percent since 1990, thus more than fulfilling their commitments under the Kyoto protocol.

However, these figures only consider the emissions from industrial and other domestic economic activities, ignoring considerations such as the EU’s consumption of imports from pollution-heavy, rising economies like the People’s Republic of China, South Africa, India, and Brazil.

If international trade and local consumption of imported goods were accounted for, the CO2 emissions in Germany and France would have increased by more than 20 percent during the last 20 years, according to two new studies.

Similar estimations are true for all the major industrialised countries.

In order to calculate the real impact of ‘carbon leakage’ – increased emissions of CO2 in one country as a direct result of decreased emissions in another – scientists are now suggesting using a country's ‘carbon footprint’ as the most reliable indicator.

"The carbon footprint as a basis for a country’s climate policy obligations includes all emissions for which the consumers in that country are responsible," Gabriel Felbermayr, professor of economics at the university of Munich and author of a recent study on carbon footprints for the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research (IFO, in German), told IPS.

"If a country engages in international trade, then its carbon footprint (changes according) to the ‘CO2 content’ of its trade," Felbermayr told IPS.

The ‘CO2 content of a good’ measures total emissions resulting from the production of a commodity. It takes account not only of the direct emissions generated in each sector but also emissions in upstream stages of production.

The Kyoto protocol established that industrialised countries should reduce GHG emissions by more than five percent from their 1990 levels.

Officially, Germany has complied with this stipulation, cutting GHG emissions by 21 percent since 1990. France also claims to have reduced emissions by almost 11 percent over the last two decades.

But Felbermayr and other scientists evaluating the impact of consumption of imported goods in both countries call such figures "fallacious."

"Industrialised countries document CO2 savings but in reality emissions have only been shifted abroad, leaving total world emissions about the same," Felbermayr, whose study analysed the CO2 emissions and carbon footprints of 40 countries from 2005-2007, explained.

"Up to now, climate agreements – particularly the Kyoto protocol – measured a country’s contribution to global climate change by its CO2 emissions," Felbermayr added.

However, any reductions recorded under this system of measurement were likely illusory.

"From 2002 to 2007 France reported stagnant or slightly decreasing CO2 emissions. In contrast, its per capita footprint increased continuously over the same period."

According to traditional evaluations of CO2 emissions, China is now considered the world's worst polluter, just ahead of the U.S. But using the carbon footprint indicator, Felbermayr concludes that the U.S. continues to be the largest carbon emitter.

Carbone 4, a French bureau specialising in measuring CO2 emissions, reached a similar conclusion using its latest indicator ‘Eco2climat’, which measures all of France’s emissions including goods produced abroad for local consumption.

The Eco2climat of France estimates a 25 percent increase in GHG emissions between 1990 and 2010, instead of the 10.3 percent reduction touted by the French government.

"Our indicator estimates the actual emissions which correspond to the standard of living in France," Jean-Marc Jancovici, director and co-founder of Carbone 4, told IPS.

"Official figures suggest that France is on the right track to reducing emissions without putting any constraint upon our consumption," Jancovici added. "We at Carbone 4 have proved that such a claim is wrong."

Felbermayr estimates that in Germany, the discrepancy between footprint and emissions has also grown steadily.

"In 2002 only 2.5 percent of CO2 consumption was imported from abroad," he said. "By 2007 imported emissions had shot up to nine percent."

Such growth corresponds to emissions caused by increasing industrial production in strong emerging economies, especially China and South Africa. According to Felbermayr’s study, China exports more than 27 percent of its emissions, followed by South Africa (20.7 percent) and the Czech Republic (19.4)

By the same token, the largest net importers of emissions are Switzerland (58.4 percent), Sweden (36 percent), Norway (33 percent), the Netherlands (32 percent) and France (26 percent).

The two studies echo warnings issued repeatedly by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), first in 2005 and then again in 2009.

"Efforts to mitigate GHG emissions will be less effective in reducing global emissions if countries with emission commitments relocate their carbon-intensive production activities to countries without such commitments – particularly if production in the latter countries is GHG-intensive," according to a 2005 research study by the OECD.

At the time of publication this study revealed, "Consumption-based CO2 emissions of (the 30 most industrialised) countries were, on average, about 16 percent higher in 2005 than conventional measures of production-based emissions suggest."

By 2009, the situation had worsened, and the OECD insisted that the "relocation process (of industrial activities) and increased ‘carbon trade’ appear to be contrary to the GHG reductions envisioned in international agreements."

But these warnings went unheard, leading scientists like Felbermayr now to call for using carbon footprints, rather than national estimates of GHG emissions, as an indicator for international reduction agreements.

"To prevent carbon leakage, a future climate agreement should be oriented on the carbon footprint instead of domestic emissions," he said.

"The carbon footprint can be very precisely targeted by the state levying a consumer tax on the CO2 content of a good," he said.

In addition, "the use of the carbon footprint could also increase the willingness of China and India to participate in international climate change agreements," such as the agreement currently being discussed in Durban, South Africa.