Investigating a Recycling Disaster

A lot of companies market themselves as clean and green to people who care about the environment. But global supply chains have grown so complex that it’s difficult to know if a product is actually environmentally friendly, or if it carries a horrible human cost.

My colleague Peter Goodman has investigated corporations for the past quarter century. He recently spent time in Nigeria reporting on factories that recycle the batteries that go into millions of American and European cars. He came back with unrelenting headaches and elevated lead levels in his blood — a small indication of what the people who live near these factories endure every day. Read his report for us below.

A town covered in lead

Lead dust is everywhere in Ogijo, a town north of Lagos — on kitchen floors, vegetable gardens, church grounds and schoolyards.

With every breath, local people absorb lead particles into their bloodstreams. The metal seeps into their brains, wreaking havoc on nervous systems. Toddlers ingest it by crawling across floors and then putting their hands in their mouths, in some cases leading to irreversible brain damage.

This public health catastrophe is the result of local factories that recycle car batteries, extracting the lead within to make new products. They do this in Nigeria thanks to a well-established, if unsavory, reality of the global economy: As tighter standards have limited lead pollution in wealthier nations, manufacturers have shifted their sights abroad. They rely increasingly on communities so desperate for jobs that their leaders have tacitly accepted lead poisoning as the cost of livelihood.

You can click here to read the details of our investigation, conducted in partnership with The Examination, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates global health. We commissioned blood tests for 70 Ogijo residents, which found harmful levels of lead in 7 out of 10 people. And we traced the lead recycled in Nigeria to a major battery manufacturer in the U.S. whose products are found under the hoods of millions of cars.

What is happening in Nigeria is both shocking and familiar. Shocking because of the scale of the harm involved; familiar because similar dynamics are at work across thousands of other products.

As supply chains extend across oceans, the links have become so complex that retailers are sometimes unsure about the origins of their parts and raw materials. Even the best-intentioned companies struggle to figure out what they are buying, from whom and with what social and environmental consequences.

Same story, different industries

Over the last quarter-century, I have written multiple versions of this basic story.

While looking into illegal logging in Asia, I discovered that a major international retailer was unaware — or could at least plausibly deny — that it was using logs illegally cut in the Russian Far East.

I learned that a prominent American fashion brand either did not know — or preferred not to discuss — the brutal tactics used to crush a labor movement at a factory making its products in Guatemala.

And I found an enormous American retailer that employed a multinational auditing company to scrutinize factories all over the world, including in Vietnam, Turkey and Mexico, for child labor, yet paid almost no attention to the next link in the chain — the suppliers of its suppliers.

Battery recycling is an especially toxic industry to explore.

North American and European battery manufacturers have pioneered elaborate systems of recycling and marketed themselves as stewards of the environment. The auto industry cites its reuse of lead as a prime example of the circular economy.

Yet, in using imported lead, manufacturers rely on middlemen to provide assurances that the metal has been safely produced. These middlemen conduct inspections in which they flag problems and recommend the addition of pollution-limiting equipment, but they leave it to the factories to decide whether to follow through.

In essence, the industry has engineered a system in which everyone can plausibly blame someone else when trouble comes to light.

Our investigation revealed that some of the lead recycled in Nigeria was being purchased by East Penn Manufacturing, the second-largest automotive battery manufacturer in the U.S. When we confronted the company, the executive chairman told us that, until our inquiry, it had relied on its brokers’ assurances that everything was fine.

“Could that be me being too trusting?” he said. “I’ll take that shot.”

The incentives to do things cheaply

We also spent time with a company in Nigeria called Green Recycling that took on the extra costs of doing it right, borrowing millions of dollars to install equipment that limits lead pollution.

But Green could not compete with other companies. It could not charge enough to cover its borrowing costs. It could not pay enough for spent batteries and was constantly outbid. And Green is now out of business.

And here is perhaps the most unsettling part of these supply chains. Because most of their parts are invisible to consumers — and even to other companies involved in production — the incentive to do things right is frequently trumped by a more powerful force: the rewards of doing things cheaply. Even when that comes at the cost of permanent lead poisoning in poor communities in West Africa.

Read the full article here.

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