The ‘Clean’ Technology That’s Poisoning People

From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. In the contentious fight over how to address climate change in The United States, recycled lead is a feel good story. It can be processed with techniques that keep workers safe and reused in batteries that power millions of vehicles around the world. But a New Times investigation reveals how this environmental initiative comes at a major human cost. Today, Peter Goodman explains the dirty business of a supposedly clean technology. It's Tuesday, December 2. Peter, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. You are one of our foremost experts on the global economy, and you just came out with this really eye opening investigation on recycled batteries and lead poisoning, which I will bet is not something that most people know a lot about. So I'm very curious to know two things. One, how did you even get on this investigation? And number two, how much did you, Peter, know about recycled batteries when you first started? I knew zero Zero. About recycled batteries. And that's that's that's rounding up. Okay. So I got a call from a guy at The Examination, which is this relatively new independent investigative newsroom that specializes in global public health. And they have this really terrific reporter, a guy I'd never met, though I'd heard about him, Will Fitzgibbon. He had done a fair bit of work already in Africa. He he was a lead expert. He dug into the lead recycling industry. And and this is the industry that supplies a lot of the car batteries that we find under the hoods of cars in The US. We're talking new cars, used cars at places like AutoZone, Home Depot, Walmart. Mhmm. And a lot of the lead that we're using to make car batteries in The US is coming from outside of The US because we've run out of supply domestically. So the industry has gone out looking around the world for new sources of lead and one of the places it's now looking quite aggressively is Nigeria. Will had already spent a fair bit of time looking into what this business actually looks like on the ground. He'd already figured out that the process of recycling lead was being done in a way that was really quite horrific to see up close. It was really harmful to people and he'd have this terrific idea, which was that, you know, we would actually go and test people. We would find people willing to volunteer for blood tests and quantify just exactly how much lead was reaching people's bloodstreams and we'd also test soil to look into the tainting of the food supply. And so I got enlisted to try to take a run at figuring out who was buying it, how the terms of trade were going down, all the logistics along the way. They wanted me because I've been writing versions of complex supply chain stories now …