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

Abstract

In 2008, the United States announced stricter occupational and ambient air emissions standards for lead, the first such change in three decades, 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. Leveraging regulatory asymmetries is one dimension of ecologically unequal exchange or the patterned exploitation of nature whereby corporations based in more dominant nations gain access to raw materials and shift the risks of pollution intensive economic production. In this regard, the U.S.-Mexico border 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 a ten-fold greater threshold for the imposition of ambient, lead-laced, air releases. Battery manufacturing comprises a circular economy in which nearly all lead comes from secondary recovery rather than mining, but there is a detour spanning thousands of miles and traversing through working class communities in Mexico. It is a central contradiction within what is widely touted as the most ecologically modern industry in the U.S.