Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Andrew Ross Sorkin, the founder of Dealbook. Every year, I interview some of the world's most influential leaders across politics, culture, and business at the Dealbook Summit, a live event in New York City. On this year's podcast, you'll hear my unfiltered conversations with Gavin Newsom, the CEO of Palantir and Anthropic, and Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk.
Listen to Dealbook Summit wherever you get your podcasts.
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. In the contentious fight over how to address climate change in the United States, recycled lead is a feel-good story. It can be processed with techniques that keep workers safe and reused in batteries that power millions of vehicles around the world.
But a New Times investigation reveals how this environmental initiative comes at a major human cost. Today, Peter Goodman explains the dirty business of a supposedly clean technology. It's Tuesday, December 2nd. Peter, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
You are one of our foremost experts on the global economy, and you just came out with this really eye-opening investigation on recycled batteries and lead poisoning, which I will bet is not something that most people know a lot about. So I'm very curious to know two things. One, how did you even get on this investigation? And number two, how much did you, Peter...
know about recycled batteries when you first started?
I knew zero about recycled batteries, and that's rounding up. Okay. So I got a call from a guy at the examination, which is this relatively new independent investigative newsroom that specializes in global public health. And they have this really terrific reporter, a guy I'd never met, though I'd heard about him, Will Fitzgibbon. He had done a fair bit of work already in Africa.
He was a lead expert. He dug into the lead recycling industry. And this is the industry that supplies a lot of the car batteries that we find under the hoods of cars in the U.S. We're used cars at places like AutoZone, Home Depot, Walmart. And a lot of the lead that we're using to make car batteries in the US is coming from outside of the US because we've run out of supply domestically.
So the industry's gone out looking around the world for new sources of lead. And one of the places it's now looking quite aggressively is Nigeria. Will had already spent a fair bit of time looking into what this business actually looks like on the ground. He'd already figured out that the process of recycling lead was being done in a way that was really quite horrific to see up close.
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Chapter 2: How does the recycling of lead in car batteries impact global health?
And I didn't know anything about this particular industry, but I did have some inkling about shipping, logistics. And I was certainly intrigued to try to make the connection between this public health catastrophe in West Africa and the auto industry in the United States.
That connection sounds incredibly challenging to make.
Yeah, it's enormously challenging, especially because we're talking about a trade that's secret. I mean, the participants have no interest in talking to anybody about this stuff. There's limited publicly available data. And so I found myself taking on what, quite honestly, was the most difficult reporting assignment of my career.
Where did you actually start the reporting journey?
So Will had already done a lot of this legwork. He already had sources in Nigeria. He understood where these factories were. And then I went there with Will to nail down the real-life consequences for the people living in villages right next to these places.
plants and also to go talk to people in Lagos who could tell us about the Nigeria supply chain part of it before this lead gets put into shipping containers and sent across the water for ports around the world.
So where exactly did you go and what did you see there?
So I went to a place called Ogijo, which is just north of Lagos, which is a sprawling, you know, enormous metropolitan area. And Ogijo is sort of a combination of an industrial and rural where there are a bunch of smelters, including the one that we wound up focusing on called True Metals. And we picked it not only because it's really bad in terms of the pollution that it puts out,
but also because it only deals in lead. And these are large factories where people are feeding this lead into these giant furnaces that send smoke wafting throughout the area, including in these villages that are right next to the factories. So I spent a lot of time just sitting with families, talking to them about the struggle of living next door to these plants. People were coughing.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Peter Goodman face during his investigation?
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.
So it sounds like these places are operating with very little regulation. How did you end up tracing what happens to the lead that they produce?
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. And then the story ended.
So my job was to figure out, well, then what happens?
So how did you do that?
So I quickly figured out there's no expert to call. There's nobody who did a dissertation on this. There's no book. There's no YouTube documentaries to watch for tips. There isn't even, you know, Reddit to go get dubious, you know, tips. I was just... Yeah, it was just a black box. And I started to reach out to people who worked for these trading companies.
The one I was most focused on was this company called Trafigura.
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Chapter 4: What did Peter observe in the lead recycling factories in Nigeria?
So Will had commissioned this team of independent scientists in Nigeria who found 70 volunteers. And we're talking about 14 children, 16 people who worked at these lead smelters. And these were people who live... very close to these smelters.
You know, imagine a village, and in the very center of the village, you know, churches right up against the walls of these factories, schools right up against the walls of these factories. So life is playing out all around.
And we tested 70 people, volunteers, right in the vicinity, and roughly seven out of 10 of them had levels of lead in their blood deemed dangerous by various medical authorities. Wow. So one of the things that we were focused on was this comparison with the worst lead disaster at a battery manufacturer in Southern California more than a decade ago, which was a federal emergency.
I mean, the feds went in, they shut the place down, they tested people, they took over, they're still managing this. And there was a soil test conducted at a preschool there that found 95 parts per million lead. Let me give you that number again. 95 parts per million. We tested a school in Ogejo where we found 1,900 parts per million.
My God.
Yeah.
At that level of contamination, what kind of health effects would you expect immediately?
Well, first of all, you're talking about irreversible brain damage, especially for children. You're talking about respiratory problems, relentless headaches, exhaustion, just a lack of functioning. And that's the lead, right? And then there's just the reality of you're living in a place where there's smoke and terrible fumes all the time and people are coughing. It's just a living nightmare.
So what happened after you did all this testing?
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Chapter 5: How does lead poisoning affect communities near recycling plants?
We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met for hours with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris. The meeting was part of a blitz to shore up support from European allies in the midst of negotiations over a U.S.-led plan to end the war with Russia.
While Macron reiterated Europe's commitment to Ukraine, the United States has put increasing pressure on Zelensky to agree to a deal, even as Russia has signaled its opposition to some of the plan's proposals. And the Transportation Security Administration announced that beginning February 1st, travelers without a Real ID compliant form of identification will have to pay a $45 fee to fly.
Passengers can prepay the fee up to 10 days before they come to the airport. Many travelers have already begun flying with passports and other documents considered compliant with the program. The TSA did not immediately reveal how to pay the new fee and other details about the program. Today's episode was produced by Diana Nguyen, Anna Foley, and Rochelle Banja.
It was edited by Chris Haxell and Michael Benoit, contains music by Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Special thanks to Will Fitzgibbon and Finbar O'Reilly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.