Lead for car batteries poisons an African town

[babylonsister]

Lead for car batteries poisons an African town
By HEIDI VOGT Associated Press Writer


Jan 3rd, 2009 | THIAROYE SUR MER, Senegal -- First, it took the animals. Goats fell silent and refused to stand up. Chickens died in handfuls, then en masse. Street dogs disappeared.

Then it took the children. Toddlers stopped talking and their legs gave out. Women birthed stillborns. Infants withered and died. Some said the houses were cursed. Others said the families were cursed.

The mysterious illness killed 18 children in this town on the fringes of Dakar, Senegal's capital, before anyone in the outside world noticed. When they did -- when the TV news aired parents' angry pleas for an investigation, when the doctors ordered more tests, when the West sent health experts -- they did not find malaria, or polio or AIDS, or any of the diseases that kill the poor of Africa.

They found lead.

The dirt here is laced with lead left over from years of extracting it from old car batteries. So when the price of lead quadrupled over five years, residents started digging up the earth to get at it. The World Health Organization says the area is still severely contaminated, 10 months after a government cleanup.

The tragedy of Thiaroye Sur Mer gives a glimpse at how the globalization of a modern tool -- the car battery -- can wreak havoc in the developing world.

more...

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/world/2009/01/03/D95FS2IG0_af_killer_batteries/index.html

[pl259]

1. Tragic but not much different, really, than the havoc caused by gold mining

in south America. Or diamond mines in S. Africa. At least lead and gold have intrinsic value unlike gem-quality diamonds.
:shrug:

[DeSwiss]

2. Yes, and this....

...http://www.things.org/~jym/greenpeace/myth-of-battery-recycling.html">"lead dumping" has been going on for quite a while. Along with the dumping of other heavy metals and hazardous crap. We ship it all to the 3rd world and let them "salvage" it.

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."

http://www.things.org/~jym/greenpeace/myth-of-battery-recycling.html

- K&R