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, according to a draft report by the CEC - The Commission for Environmental Cooperation. The CEC is the watchdog group created by the US, Mexico, and Canada to respond to environmental concerns stemming from the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The rising flow of batteries is a result of rigid US environmental rules on lead pollution, which make domestic recycling more difficult and expensive, but do not prohibit companies from exporting the work - and the danger - to lead recycling facilities south of the border where standards are low, labor costs are minimal, and regulation 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.

In 2004, used battery exports to Mexico were around 130 million pounds compared to 750 million pounds last year, according to the report, which recommends that Mexico bring its environmental regulations up to more strict standards.

The report was overseen by CEC director Evan Lloyd, whose term expired last week. Irasema Coronado is the organization’s new director, and says the flood of batteries sent to Mexico leaves the country susceptible to contamination because of its lagging environmental rules. The report did not make definitive conclusions, but cited it as a possibility pending further analysis.

The report also pressed for the United States to implement more detailed reporting requirements for companies exporting lead batteries abroad, for better tracking of how the hazardous materials are being disposed of.

Beyond North America, the report also found companies exporting lead to countries which the US has no permission to do so, a violation of international agreements.

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.

About 20 million American vehicle and industrial 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. Trade records show that more than sixty 18-wheelers full of old batteries cross the border each day.

Spent batteries house up to 40 pounds of lead, which can cause high blood pressure and kidney damage in adults, and serious developmental 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 vast recycling compounds in Mexico, batteries are 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.

The recycling factories are putting neighborhoods 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 plants but lacks the money to do so. The town’s elementary school is on the same block as one of the recycling plants and lead pollution remains in the ground for decades.

A sample of soil collected 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.

One Border, 2 Standards

"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 group devoted to reducing lead exposure.

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 EPA 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 sees children with seriously delayed development and that she is 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 EPA only began requiring that American companies report their exports in the last two years — 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 EPA, 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 EPA declined to speak publicly on the export trade, instead explaining in a statement that its role was "limited to processing" the paperwork for the battery tracking system.

"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.

The deputy director for industrial inspection at the Mexican legal agency that oversees environmental compliance, known as Profepa, said regulating the battery trade is an "important priority," but early efforts to control it have mostly exposed the daunting size of the task. A 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.

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 past 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 EPA says it has opened investigations into three cases of illegal battery exports recently - all resulting from tips from American companies trying to operate within government rules, agency officials said.

In Mexico, a truck from Texas was impounded last year 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 later 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.

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 of the recycling plant 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 multifaceted trading system where traceability is impossible.

The source 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 fluctuated from 25 cents to 40 cents a pound in the past few years, up from 5 cents a pound a decade ago. The lower the cost to extract the lead, the bigger the profit margin — a reality, experts say, that encourages smuggling and fuels a battery black market.

Federico Magalini, a researcher at the United Nations University who is trying to evaluate the illegal lead trade, said batteries were ideal for smuggling because — unlike bulky refrigerators or computer monitors — they are compact and about 60 percent 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 EPA 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 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 EPA export notices. The company runs one licensed recycling plant in Mexico and is constructing another one; it is also building a new recycling plant in South Carolina.

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 US standard or a German standard," he said. "We have our one standard globally, which today is being driven by the EPA."

Although Johnson Controls has won praise from the EPA 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 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 Guadalajara plant say they had been told by the government that the ground water was contaminated with lead, as 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 take good care of the men. "Anyway," she said, "there are not many other jobs around here."

Environmental advocates and domestic recyclers say the responsibility 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.

Source:NYTimes.com