Most facilities in Africa are small. They weren’t built with adequate pollution controls to prevent disasters and ongoing contamination. The production of lead batteries is growing rapidly in Africa as the market for lead batteries expands. Global lead output continues to grow, with about 85% production going to make batteries.
Smelting lead from spent car batteries is done over open-fire furnaces around the world. This image, from 2008, was taken in Dakar, Senegal. Gottesfeld has researched lead poisoning for 30 years.
The lead-acid battery smelter, visible in the background of this photo, lead to a mass poisoning in Owino Uhuru, a village in Mombasa, Kenya’s second-largest city. Pop the hood of nearly any car and you’ll find a battery the size of a breadbox.
The lead-acid battery industry boasts that its product is recyclable; lithium-ion batteries—lead-acid’s primary competitor—are currently not, because the cost to recycle them is currently three times the value of the recovered materials.