The Hidden Cost of Recycled Batteries: A Global Health Crisis

Toxic Legacy: How Lead Recycling in Nigeria Poisons Communities While Supplying American Companies

In the small town of Ogijo, just outside Lagos, Nigeria, a silent killer descends from the sky each day. Poisonous dust, laden with lead particles, settles on kitchen floors, vegetable gardens, churchyards, and schoolyards, infiltrating every aspect of daily life. This toxic soot billows from crude factories that recycle lead for American companies, creating an environmental disaster with devastating human consequences.

With every breath, residents inhale invisible lead particles that enter their bloodstream, attack their nervous systems, and damage vital organs like the liver and kidneys. Young children are particularly vulnerable, ingesting the dust while crawling across contaminated surfaces and putting their hands in their mouths. The health implications are catastrophic and long-lasting.

An investigation by The New York Times and The Examination, a nonprofit newsroom focused on global health, found alarming evidence of widespread poisoning in this community. When 70 residents living near and working in factories around Ogijo volunteered for blood testing, seven out of ten had harmful levels of lead in their systems. Every worker tested showed signs of lead poisoning, and more than half the children had levels that could cause lifelong brain damage. Environmental samples revealed lead concentrations up to 186 times higher than what is generally considered hazardous, putting the more than 20,000 people living within a mile of these factories at severe risk.

A Global Health Crisis Hidden in Plain Sight

Lead poisoning is estimated to cause more deaths worldwide each year than malaria and HIV/AIDS combined. The toxic metal triggers seizures, strokes, blindness, and irreversible intellectual disabilities. According to the World Health Organization, no level of lead in the body is safe.

The public health disaster unfolding in Ogijo represents a larger pattern across Africa. In Togo, lead soot from a recycling plant falls onto tomato and pineapple farms near a village. In Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam, a factory has contaminated a soccer field. In Ghana, lead recyclers operate next to family homes and livestock.

Ogijo and its surrounding areas have become Africa’s lead recycling heartland, processing more lead than anywhere else on the continent. The United States imported enough lead from Nigeria alone last year to manufacture millions of batteries. Companies using Nigerian lead produce batteries for major automakers and retailers including Ford, General Motors, Tesla, Amazon, Lowe’s, and Walmart.

“When we mop, our feet are black,” explains one resident, describing the pervasive contamination that invades every home. Schools, churches, and seminaries operate within sight of these hazardous facilities, exposing the most vulnerable members of society to dangerous toxins daily.

How American Regulations Shifted the Burden Overseas

Lead is an essential component in car batteries, but mining and processing it is expensive. As an alternative, recycling has become a cheaper, seemingly sustainable source of this hazardous metal. However, this “sustainability” comes with a devastating human cost.

Over the past three decades, the United States has tightened regulations on lead processing to protect its citizens. These stricter standards made finding domestic lead more challenging, prompting the automotive industry to look overseas to supplement its supply. In doing so, car and battery manufacturers effectively transferred the health consequences of lead recycling to countries with lax enforcement, minimal testing requirements, and workers desperate for employment.

“As the United States and Canada have driven dirty smelters out of business with environmental regulations, buyers have searched the world for new suppliers,” explains Andreas Manhart, a senior researcher at Oeko-Institut, a German environmental organization who has visited at least 20 African factories. “We see investors coming in, setting up new, substandard operations. And every time, this leaves a highly polluted site.”

The auto industry promotes battery recycling as an environmental success story, claiming that lead from old batteries can be safely melted down and reused repeatedly with minimal pollution. However, this narrative only holds true when recycling occurs under strict safety protocols with proper equipment—conditions rarely found in facilities across Africa.

An Opaque Supply Chain Built on Plausible Deniability

The global battery recycling industry operates through a complex supply chain designed to obscure responsibility. Companies have rejected proposals to use only lead certified as safely produced, and automakers have notably excluded lead from their environmental policies.

Battery manufacturers rely on the assurances of trading companies that lead is recycled cleanly. These intermediaries, in turn, depend on perfunctory audits that make recommendations rather than demands. This system effectively allows everyone involved to claim that someone else is responsible for oversight.

Trafigura, a global trading company that reported $243 billion in revenue last year, has sent recycled lead to U.S. companies from True Metals and six other Nigerian smelters in the past four years. The company hires contractors to audit suppliers, but these evaluations appear to have little impact on actual practices.

One True Metals worker, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect his job, revealed that visits were announced in advance, allowing management to prepare. Most workers were sent home, while those remaining received new safety equipment and coaching on how to respond to questions. After such audits, consultants issue recommendations ranging from simple fixes, like providing safety gear, to expensive solutions such as installing new equipment. Typically, smelters implement only the affordable changes while ignoring the rest.

“Our approach to responsible sourcing seeks to improve standards by providing clear expectations, training and capacity-building matched with monitoring,” said Neil Hume, a Trafigura spokesman, adding that the company drops suppliers that “consistently” fail to improve. However, Trafigura declined to discuss what it knew about conditions at suppliers like True Metals.

The Competitive Disadvantage of Clean Operations

Among Ogijo’s recycling plants, Green Recycling Industries attempted to live up to its name. International experts who visited the facility last year marveled at its pollution control technology and machinery that safely broke apart batteries—the kind of equipment featured in American battery makers’ promotional videos.

“The equipment and recycling processes are significantly different and of a remarkably higher standard than observed in any other plant in Nigeria,” the experts wrote in their assessment.

But operating cleanly put Green Recycling at a severe competitive disadvantage. The company had to recoup its high machinery costs by offering less money for dead batteries. Consistently outbid by competitors with crude operations, Green Recycling eventually found itself without materials to recycle.

Ali Fawaz, the company’s general manager, explained the brutal economics: “If killing people is OK, why would I not kill more and more?” The company shut down earlier this year, unable to compete with cheaper, dirtier operations.

“Healthwise, we made a correct decision, but businesswise, we made a very bad decision,” Fawaz reflected. “It’s a bad investment unless you’re dirty.”

The Human Toll: Lives Forever Changed by Lead Poisoning

The human impact of this environmental crisis is profound and heartbreaking. Four years ago, Oluwabukola Bakare was pregnant with her fifth child when she moved into a home in Ogijo within sight of a battery recycling factory. The smoke seeped through windows at night, making her family cough and leaving black powder on their floor and food.

“In the morning, when we looked outside, the ground seemed to be covered in charcoal,” Bakare recalled. Testing revealed her 5-year-old son Samuel had a blood-lead level of 15 micrograms per deciliter, three times the level at which the World Health Organization recommends intervention. His 8-year-old brother Israel tested even higher.

Bakare herself, who has worked inside battery recycling factories cleaning toilets and sinks, had a lead level of 31.1 micrograms per deciliter—a concentration associated with miscarriages and preterm birth. Now she wonders if factory emissions contributed to her son’s premature birth at seven months.

To understand the severity of Ogijo’s contamination, consider what happened more than a decade ago in Vernon, California. When soil testing around a recycling plant revealed high lead levels at a nearby preschool, officials declared an environmental disaster. The factory closed, and cleanup efforts continue today. The soil at the California preschool contained lead at 95 parts per million. In Ogijo, soil at one school had more than 1,900 parts per million—20 times higher.

Failed Regulation and Broken Promises

Despite the clear dangers, Nigerian officials struggle to enforce meaningful regulations. The government faces numerous challenges, including armed insurgency, endemic corruption, and limited capacity to provide basic health services. Power is distributed among federal, state, and local authorities, creating overlapping jurisdictions with unclear responsibilities.

The traditional monarch of Ogijo, King Kazeem Kashimawo Olaonipekun Gbadamosi, expressed frustration with the situation. “I just want to close them all down,” he said from his wooden throne. His subjects have complained for years about the factories, reporting common symptoms of lead poisoning: headaches, stomachaches, seizures, learning delays, and other neurological issues.

Despite numerous complaints and media coverage dating back to 2018, little has changed. Factory managers often apologize and promise improvements—sometimes providing electrical lines and streetlights to make amends—but the pollution persists. “The government always says, ‘No, no, no, just give them time. Let’s get them to change,'” the king explained.

In September 2023, after researchers presented their findings, Nigerian officials temporarily closed five smelters, including True Metals. “Tests have revealed the presence of lead in residents, resulting in illnesses and deaths,” announced Innocent Barikor, director general of Nigeria’s environmental protection agency. The factories were cited for operating without required pollution control equipment, failing to conduct blood tests on staff, and breaking batteries apart by hand rather than with machines.

But just days later, the factories were running again. Rather than revoking licenses, Barikor met with factory owners who agreed to make improvements over the next two to three years. The waste-disposal promise has already been delayed as authorities search for a suitable dump site, and the agreement signed by True Metals says nothing about installing automated battery-breaking systems.

Corporate Responsibility and Future Prospects

As awareness grows about the source of recycled lead, some companies are beginning to reconsider their practices. East Penn Manufacturing, the second-largest battery manufacturer in the United States, acknowledged that lead shortages had forced it to rely on brokers, with “under 5 percent” coming from Nigeria.

Chris Pruitt, East Penn’s executive chairman, admitted the company had paid little attention to the provenance of its lead until questioned by journalists. “Could that be me being too trusting? I’ll take that shot,” he conceded. Since then, East Penn has stopped buying Nigerian lead and begun tightening its supplier code of conduct, implementing additional scrutiny for lead purchases and requiring monthly reports about overseas acquisitions.

For residents of Ogijo, however, solutions remain elusive. When researchers gathered community members to share test results, anxious workers and parents lined up to speak with nurses and collect multivitamins and calcium tablets, which can help limit lead absorption. But these treatments represent only a partial response to a much larger problem.

Medical experts typically recommend reducing exposure as the first step in addressing lead poisoning. This might involve covering chipped lead paint, replacing lead water pipes, or adding clean topsoil over contaminated dirt. But there is no established protocol for reducing exposure when homes are continuously contaminated by lead dust falling from the sky.

Thomas Ede, a resident whose family tested positive for lead poisoning, expressed his helplessness: “I don’t know the way out. There’s nothing from the government. They’re saying, ‘Just go away.'” Yet Ede lacks the financial resources to relocate his family.

The morning after receiving his test results, Ede stepped outside the single room he shares with his three children, all sleeping together on a crumbling mattress. Looking past his clothesline toward True Metals, he saw two shipping containers at the front gates, ready for their loads—another shipment of recycled lead headed for global markets, while his community continues to suffer the consequences.