Remember the Flint, Michigan, water crisis? The public health disaster that, at its peak, poisoned nearly 5 percent of the city’s children with dangerously high levels of lead in their water? It was perhaps one of the few public health crises in the US that rose to the prominence of a national scandal, sparking outrage and dominating headlines for years.
The fallout led to lawsuits, local and federal investigations, firings of top officials, and a settlement north of $600 million.
But as scandalous as the Flint crisis was, it represents just the tip of a global iceberg.
Around the world, an estimated one in three children — about 800 million kids — has lead levels in their blood as high, or higher, than the kids in Flint did. That should be a huge cause of concern because lead is a potent neurotoxin that leads to impaired IQ in children, premature deaths in the elderly, and a host of negative effects that last a lifetime. And as far as we know, there are no safe levels of lead exposure.
Starting in the 1970s, the US and many European countries began eliminating lead from paint and gasoline as the health dangers became undeniable. Algeria, the last country to do so, phased out leaded gasoline in 2021, but lead paint still remains legal in many low- and middle-income countries.
But increasingly, researchers are pointing to lead-acid batteries — which are used everywhere, in both developing and wealthy nations, to start nearly every gas car and to provide backup power in hospitals and data centers — as one of the leading yet most neglected sources of lead exposure worldwide.
The batteries themselves aren’t dangerous. The problem arises once they’re dead and need to be recycled. A typical car battery holds about 15–20 pounds of lead, which is worth about $15 based on the global price of lead. That makes these batteries valuable, not trash. And in a lot of low- and middle-income countries, that value is extracted in small mom-and-pop shops, tin-roof sheds, or shoddy recycling operations — about 10,000 to 30,000 of them globally.
Here’s how a typical informal operation works in much of the Global South: Workers buy old batteries, crack them open, drain the acid on the ground, then melt down the lead plates in makeshift furnaces. The melted lead is poured into molds, and the resulting ingots are then sold to make new batteries or other products.
Doing this is much cheaper and more profitable than running a proper facility, but far more dangerous. The process releases lead-filled dust that drifts into nearby homes, soil, and water. The toxic leftovers from melting down plates — called slag — often end up dumped in nearby fields and streams.
Even when work moves into formal factories, the danger doesn’t necessarily go away. In Nigeria, for example, licensed plants often operate with poor dust control, careless slag disposal, and little protection for workers. And the problem isn’t confined to poorer nations. A 2023 investigation from the New York Times revealed that formal recycling facilities in Mexico — a relatively wealthier nation — still poisoned nearby communities. As Andreas Manhart of the Öko-Institut, a German nonprofit environmental research group, put it, taking a job at some of these poorly-operated plants can be “like receiving a death sentence.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, we already know how to fix it.
Brazil, once dominated by illegal backyard smelters, has managed to formalize the trade: By 2022, more than 75 percent of its lead-acid batteries were being recycled in licensed facilities. The standards aren’t perfect, but they’re far safer than informal smelting. It did not take inventing a new technology, but a deliberate change in rules and incentives. China, in its own way, forced a nationwide shutdown of illegal smelters and then added incentives to pull the trade into the formal sector. South Africa has made progress by requiring manufacturers to take old batteries back, and the Philippines is piloting similar ideas.
“What you have is a very classic externality problem,” said Hugo Smith, a researcher who writes the Substack Lead Battery Notes. In other words, informal recyclers save money by cutting corners, but the real costs — poisoned kids, contaminated soil, lifelong health damage — are pushed onto the community. “You need policy to step in because there’s this fundamental mismatch in the economic incentives.”
With the right rules, those incentives can be flipped. Countries can steer their used batteries away from backyard smelters and into regulated facilities that are up to 90 percent safer when done well, said Micaella Rogers, who co-founded the nonprofit Lead Acid Battery Recycling Initiative.
The stakes are high. Eliminating lead is arguably one of the highest-return moves in global health. The World Bank estimated in 2023 that lead exposure drains nearly $6 trillion a year from the global economy — about 7 percent of GDP — and causes millions of premature deaths.
So what levers could actually fix it?
Stop (accidentally) subsidizing pollution
To understand why backyard smelting exists in the first place, you need to know how old batteries move through the system.
When a car, motorbike, or backup generator battery dies, it still contains 15 to 20 pounds of valuable lead. In the US or Europe, take-back laws mean that mechanics or retailers must return used batteries back into a regulated system. But in much of the Global South, things look very different. Old batteries are collected by scrap dealers, traded in street markets, or exported across borders — and whoever pays the most usually gets them.
That’s where the problem begins. The dirtiest recyclers — the ones cutting corners on safety and skipping taxes — can offer higher prices. They’re saving money by not spending on pollution controls or worker protection, so they can outbid better operators.
And yet most governments still treat dead batteries as a waste management issue, leaving it to environment ministries that focus on disposal. “The real levers to solve this sit with finance and trade, not just environment,” Rogers said. Federal finance ministries and departments set the taxes and tariffs. Trade ministries decide who can buy and sell. So these ministries, not the environment offices, actually hold the power to decide where the batteries end up.
Brazil is a case study in how to fix those incentives. For years, its informal recyclers — often small, unlicensed smelters — had the edge because they didn’t pay Brazil’s value-added tax (VAT), a kind of sales tax, while licensed plants did. In 2005, the government stopped charging VAT on sales of old batteries to recyclers. And that’s given licensed plants an edge to either match or beat informal buyers on price. Once the economic incentives flipped, the batteries started flowing into safer, regulated plants.
Removing taxes is crucial for this model to work. India adopted a Brazil-style buyback rule a few years ago, requiring manufacturers to take back used batteries. But unlike Brazil, India kept their taxes on scrap in place, giving informal recyclers a built-in price advantage and blunting the reform. “You basically can’t expect the formal sector to outbid the informal sector for scrap when the informal sector starts with a 15 percent advantage,” said Smith.
This kind of tax change fix works best in nations with solidly middle-income populations, a lot of domestic battery manufacturing, and very good control on imports, Smith argued. In those settings, tweaking the tax numbers really can decide whether used batteries flow to backyards or to regulated plants. But in poorer countries with fragmented markets and weak customs, a tax break alone won’t cut it.
And even in Brazil, fixing the tax was just the first step — the real challenge was making sure every battery actually made it back.
Make the manufacturer responsible
If the first solution changes who can pay the most for dead batteries, this one changes who’s on the hook for getting them back.
Instead of trying to police a sprawl of scrapyards and smelters, regulators can put the legal burden on the handful of companies that sell new batteries. Under this scenario, called extended producer responsibility (EPR), manufacturers must prove to regulators that for every new battery they sell, they’ve taken back an old one and sent it to a licensed recycler.
Think of it like bottle deposits in some states in the US: If a store sells drinks in glass bottles, they also have to take the empties back or help fund a system that does. With batteries, the logic is the same. The seller has to show a paper trail, proving the old stock returned to an approved recycling plant.
Brazil went all-in on this approach in 2008, building on its 2005 decision to exempt scrap batteries from VAT. The government required manufacturers and importers to buy back as many used batteries as they sold, and the industry was forced to figure out the mechanics. They did it by rewriting distributor contracts so the rule was essentially one in, one out. In practice, a pallet of new stock doesn’t ship unless there’s an equivalent weight of old batteries coming back — a rule enforced not just by regulators but by the industry itself. The trucks that deliver new batteries also pick up the used ones, so the logistics cost is minimal.
To make this system auditable, Brazil brought in the Instituto Brasileiro de Energia Reciclável (IBER), a nonprofit the industry set up with government sign-off in 2016. Think of it as the system’s bookkeeper. Companies log what they sell and take back, and recyclers log what they receive. IBER then independently cross-checks those numbers and hands out certificates showing who’s in compliance. For companies, it’s simpler than filing with a dozen agencies. For regulators, it’s one shared ledger that makes cheating harder.
The leverage here is powerful: no scrap back, no new stock. Manufacturers can simply refuse to sell to distributors who don’t return enough old batteries. That’s a much stronger enforcement mechanism than trying to send inspectors into every back-alley smelter.
Did it work? Before these rules, the World Economic Forum described Brazil as a place where “the majority” of used batteries went to illegal smelters. By 2023, IBER reported that its members — covering about three-quarters of the national market — were collecting as many batteries as they sold. In fact, members returned 104 percent of what they put on the market, meaning they pulled in even more scrap than their own sales. Of course, those numbers come from IBER, a nonprofit set up by the battery industry to handle compliance. It’s an industry-run service, not a government agency, so the system depends on companies working together and reporting honestly.
Take-back programs and recordkeeping shine where countries can clearly identify producers — whether those are domestic manufacturers or a few big importers — and where customs and tax systems can actually see the trade and auditors can verify the data. It’s a weaker fit in markets with porous borders and thousands of tiny sellers.
Apply pressure from the outside in
In fragmented, import-heavy markets, like Nigeria, just deciding who’s responsible turns into a bureaucratic slog. EPR decides who gets the batteries, but it doesn’t guarantee how they are recycled. If the “licensed” plants are low-standard, you’ve just handed the batteries to the wrong players. Here, the leverage isn’t at a city smelter or a sleepy ministry, it’s up the chain, with the traders and brands who buy the lead and decide who can sell into high-paying markets.
If access to the lucrative US, EU, or Korean markets depends on clean recycling, dirty plants suddenly have a business problem, not a moral one. The threat isn’t a fine from a weak regulator; it’s losing the right to sell into the US or Europe.
A chunk of Nigeria’s recycled lead is sold through global commodity traders like Trafigura to international buyers. In 2023, Nigeria shipped about $54 million to $75 million in refined lead to the US alone. Most of that metal feeds new lead-acid batteries — the main use for lead worldwide. But until recently, most major buyers and traders barely engaged despite being exactly those who could shift scrap from dangerous sheds to safe facilities. Only now are some companies stepping in to demand responsible recycling.
The fix is simple in theory: Make buyers do actual due diligence. International traders and manufacturers could commit to buying only from plants that meet basic safety rules — things like proper furnaces, acid treatment, worker protection — standards already spelled out in the UN’s Basel technical guidelines for used lead-acid batteries. Proof comes through receipts, paperwork, and independent spot checks. In simple terms: ensure buyers trace where their lead comes from and prove it was recycled safely, the same way electronics companies already have to for cobalt.
But right now, the policy scaffolding in high-income markets is patchy. The European Union, for example, has a minerals due-diligence program for tracing tin, tungsten, cobalt, and other minerals but lead is noticeably left off the list. And the EU Battery Regulation’s due-diligence chapter covers cobalt, lithium, nickel, and natural graphite — again, not lead.
But if lead were to be included, European buyers would have to map their supply chains, audit smelters, and drop noncompliant suppliers. The same logic can be mirrored by big US buyers via procurement, insurer, or lender requirements.
This solution works because it bypasses weak local enforcement. If a Nigerian plant can only reach the best-paying markets by meeting tough, auditable standards, the economics flip. That’s the same logic that moves batteries inside Brazil, just applied at the international level. And because trade in used batteries and lead is concentrated through a handful of regional hubs and traders, tightening a few supplier lists can move a lot of lead into safe hands.
Outside-in pressure does have its limits. It won’t define “producer” or fix customs — that’s what EPR and tax fixes are for. And without clear standards, due diligence can devolve into box-ticking. But pressure can be a realistic option where governments can’t or won’t enforce: force big buyers to source responsibly, and everyone else falls in line.
None of these levers ask countries to invent some new technology. What they change is the math. It asks them to change who can pay the most for a dead battery, who’s legally on the hook to take it back, and who gets to access rich markets. If we get those incentives right, we can potentially save hundreds of millions of children from being slowly poisoned.
We’ve known how dangerous lead is for a really long time now, and we took it out of paint and gasoline in the US decades ago. Extending that same protection everywhere would be one of the quietest, biggest public health wins of our time.
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