Lead for car batteries poisons an African town

The Decline of Lead Battery Recycling in Industrial Countries

Lead batteries and lead battery smelters have been transferring out of industrial countries in recent years, as environmental regulations have tightened and domestic lead prices have dropped. In the U.K., for example, the secondary lead industry faces a "critical situation," according to a recent issue of the Metal Bulletin. The U.K.'s Lead Development Association warned that "the current low lead price, combined with increasing associated environmental costs ... has made it less profitable" to operate secondary lead smelters. Industry officials in the U.K. are predicting that most lead smelters there will close within the next four years.

The secondary lead industry has already shifted out of North America en masse. According to the Journal of Metals, by 1987, "the inability to economically install emission controls and purchase liability insurance forced closure of over half of the secondary lead smelters in North America." The U.S. Bureau of Mines reported that "waste disposal is becoming a very significant expense and is often a difficult task to perform," and linked the problems to the closures.

The Bureau of Mines report added: "Foreign smelters can afford to bid a higher price for scrap because their capital, labor and environmental costs are lower than U.S. producers."

The surviving lead battery smelters in North America are facing fates similar to those of the U.K. smelters. According to one metals journal, secondary lead "prices continued to drop in 1992 and in 1993 because of low demand and ever-bulging inventories."

According to the American Metal Market, "Scrap trade sources have said the growing importance of poorer countries as buyers in the international battery scrap market is a reflection of the difficulty some U.S. operators have had in assuring that they can comply with increasingly strict environmental regulations."

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