Peter S. Goodman

Most people ignored me.

Some sent me to the communications people who then ignored me.

and then eventually a handful of people started helping me in a really critical way and they started to name the same likely purchaser over and over again they named east pen which is the second largest battery manufacturer in the united states it's this family-owned business they're not publicly traded

They're very quiet, and they don't like to deal with the press, and they certainly didn't want to deal with me.

So at this point, I know, and I put that in quotation marks, like I know on deep backgrounds, right, with no names attached and no documents, that East Penn is buying lead from trading companies that are bringing it into the Port of Baltimore.

But I can't prove it.

It's certainly not gonna be a satisfying, significant part of the story based on that sourcing.

I needed something stronger.

So I went to the Port of Baltimore.

I actually spent a whole day there with a really excellent photographer who had probably the most unexciting day of her life.

It was kind of a fairly futile day.

We actually chartered a little fishing boat and we just like tooled around the harbor in Baltimore and we were able to see the dock

where some of these shipments come in, we saw a trucking yard where they unloaded from the water.

And we got a sense of the geography, but there was no vessel bringing in lead on this particular day.

But I did learn something.

And because of that reporting, because of what I learned at the truck yard, I reached out to this logistics company where a guy who ran the yard

did very reluctantly and somewhat elliptically confirm that they handled lead incoming from West Africa, purchased by Trafigura, and they sent some of it out to Pennsylvania, to East Penn.

But we still...

really needed to talk to East Penn about all this because, you know, let's remember, this is the second largest battery manufacturer in the United States.

It's not a household name, it's not a company most of us ever think about, but it's there and we're participants.