While Americans slowly transition from gas-powered cars to electric, they should stop to consider the serious environmental hazards they help export, primarily to Mexico, with each spent lead car battery they discard. Lead batteries are not in use for electric cars and are a unique feature of gas-powered vehicles — yet another reminder of why the nation should accelerate its transition away from fossil-fuel engines (and the batteries that crank them) as quickly as possible. America’s battery problem is poisoning Mexicans.
It’s a little known secret that U.S. battery manufacturers and recyclers, seeking to evade expensive U.S. environmental restrictions, send their used products south of the border for recycling. The protections for Mexican workers handling the lead extracted from these batteries often are minimal, and Mexican smelters spew lead particulates onto nearby residential neighborhoods with reckless abandon.
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This is battery recycling on the cheap. Blood tests of workers and residents near these plants indicate alarmingly high lead levels. Doctors say there is no safe level of lead in the blood.
U.S. lead-battery exports to Mexico have exploded, from around 50 million in 2006 to more than 400 million a year by 2021, according to U.S. International Trade Commission figures.
A February report by Occupational Knowledge International renewed a longstanding focus on the dangers created by battery-recycling operations in a country with a record of lax environmental enforcement and a willingness by enforcers to accept bribes to look the other way. “Mexico has less stringent environmental and occupational standards for the lead battery recycling industry than in the U.S. In addition, little investment is made in enforcing environmental regulations in Mexico. The lack of protective standards and weak enforcement have been cited as reasons for why Mexico is the destination of between 75-95% of used batteries exported annually from the U.S.,” the report states.
For Americans and their lead batteries, the prevailing philosophy is out of sight, out of mind. But because of lax Mexican government enforcement, recycling plants south of the border are getting away with deadly environmental calamity. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which was renegotiated during the Trump administration, was supposed to provide mechanisms for companies in one country to challenge lax environmental standards in another country if those standards were deemed to give that country’s manufacturers an unfair trade advantage. The whole idea was for the three countries — Mexico, the United States and Canada — to compete on as equal a footing as possible. But instead of competing, U.S. battery companies simply closed up shop and moved south after having already established egregious contamination records across the United States, including Missouri.
For all the complaining about the human migratory cargo that Mexico exports northward, Americans need to perform a gut check about the deadly cargo they’re sending in the opposite direction.
