Peter S. Goodman

They would like the plants cleaned up, but they're also cognizant that if they push too hard, this industry will shift somewhere else where some other government will cut a deal with the companies that need lead and other minerals.

That's how this business tends to go.

I mean, my history of looking at

supply chain cases now going back decades is that, you know, when you get a public revelation, when you find out that, say, a fashion brand learns that they've been relying on a supplier that's been playing so dangerously that people have died in a fire or in the collapse of a building or rivers or drinking water is being poisoned, I mean, what tends to happen is the supply chain gets even more complex.

Pieces shift somewhere else, companies change their names,

Well, it's a hypothetical.

It's one that we wrestled with in reporting this story, and we concluded that there's no satisfying answer because no battery is going to be made exclusively with lead from one country or another at all.

It basically ends up getting blended together.

But the best we could figure out is you're talking about pennies on the dollar, assuming that

every participant in the chain passes on their extra costs to the next player.

You're talking about a single digit dollar number to the consumer at the end of the day in the US.

That's our best guess.

There's a lot of assumptions into that, but certainly not a large amount of money.

I think that it's fair to say that the verdict of the global marketplace on the question of what's it worth to poison entire villages in Nigeria is not that much.

Thanks so much for having me, Rachel.