Peter S. Goodman

All that stuff costs millions of dollars.

And so as regulations have gotten stricter in places like the United States, we've had

Smelters move, so that's eliminated local supply.

At the same time, demand has increased because population's growing, we got more people driving around in cars.

And so battery manufacturers have had to go around the world to go find more lead.

And what I saw in Nigeria was something very different than what you would see if you managed to get invited into a lead recycling plant in North America.

I saw, first of all, people in so-called breaking yards.

These are the places where they get the spent batteries.

They're brought by these people known as pickers who come in by rickshaw, bicycle, motorbike, truck, and they bring these old batteries into these yards.

And then men, often shirtless with no protective gear whatsoever,

use machetes to break apart the plastic cases.

Yeah.

Correct.

Incredibly dangerous.

You can just sense it.

Like, you don't need some sort of PhD in environmental science to understand that it's not a good idea to have no safety goggles.

to have no gloves, to not have a shirt on, to be taking a machete, slamming it into an old battery with acid spewing out in every direction.

The smaller operations, they take the acid and they actually dump it into waterways.

It's just horrifying, right?

So that's just the battery breaking operations.