Peter S. Goodman

Then there's the furnaces.

This is where most of the pollution comes from.

The furnaces are these giant facilities that take the old lead taken out of spent batteries and they melt it down, they cook it at incredibly high temperatures into this molten liquid that's poured into molds.

that then form these ingots that can then be, you know, moved around, trucked to battery manufacturers that make new batteries.

And if you saw a plant, a furnace in the US, you'd see equipment used to vacuum up dust.

You'd see machinery that prevents smoke from getting out into the communities.

You'd see all sorts of automated systems to prevent workers from poisoning themselves by touching things with their bare hands.

What I saw in Nigeria was just open air.

I mean, you could see the smoke with your bare eyes just getting out between the sheets of corrugated metal that are the roofs of these factories.

You could smell it.

I was invited into people's homes.

I talked to a man who said, yeah, my walls are black.

And you could see it.

Just the smoke is so intense.

And the impacts of this are just so obvious and so palpable that it was impossible to not be moved by this.

Well, we had trade data.

You know, Will, at the examination, built a terrific database that had all the publicly available information.

So typically, a trading company will identify sources of recycled lead around the world.

They'll buy it.

They'll ship it to an endpoint in the United States, typically the port of Baltimore.