1 - Lust for Lead and Dust: The Controversial Business of Recycling Used Batteries in an Unequal World

This presentation looks at lead recycling industries, its trade regulation and its potential toxicity for the environment through examples taken from India and Senegal. Recycling used batteries can indeed be a dangerous source of pollution. Rao et al (2007) estimate that nearly 11.35 kg of lead are released into the environment during the production of 1,000 batteries, mainly due to poorly controlled recycling processes, which contaminate not only the workers who handle them, but also the surrounding areas and their inhabitants, due to emissions of lead particles and sulphur oxides (Valdez, 1997), making it a ‘deadly business’ (Manhhart A et al. 2016). While emissions around the major official sites seems to be officially better controlled because of the scrutiny they are subject to, international technical and environmental standards have also paradoxically helped to keep small-scale artisanal recovery and semi-formalised recycling operations in the shadows, surviving thanks to very low operating costs. Between environmental justice and economic logic, the analysis of battery recycling shows not only the perverse effects of the international lead trade in poor countries, but also, and above all, how these activities are maintained in marginal areas, despite the protests they may provoke, and how local entrepreneurs and nigger players can act to regularise the sector by upgrading their technology and sources of supply in order to stabilise their trade.