Lead Battery Recycling and the Ecologically Unequal Exchange of a Crescive Contaminant Across the U.S.-Mexico Border

Abstract

In 2008, the United States lowered the occupational and ambient air emissions standards for lead, but the regulations remained unchanged in Mexico. This has driven hundreds of millions of lead batteries across the border for recycling as U.S.-based companies side-step higher domestic compliance costs. In doing so, they perpetuate the unequal valuation of labor and human health commonplace across the U.S.-Mexico border. One company, Clarios, owns two of the largest lead smelters south of the border processing more than two-thirds of the batteries completing the U.S.-Mexico arbitrage cycle in recent years. Such leveraging of regulatory asymmetries is one dimension of ecologically unequal exchange wherein firms located in a more dominant nation shift the costs of pollution intensive production. In this regard, the U.S.-Mexico border does not simply reflect but produces racialized environmental violence as batteries flow freely but people do not. The veracity of this violence is detectable in the blood of those laboring under a three-fold higher occupational standard and the children living in the shadow of smelter facilities operating with ten-fold greater threshold for the imposition of ambient, lead-laced, air releases. The lead acid battery trade between the U.S. and Mexico underscores environmental load displacement by way of the secondary recovery of materials, amid differing regulatory standards, and a central contradiction within an industry widely touted as the most ecologically modern manufacturing sector in the United States.