recycle

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Rodrigo

Cruz for The New York TimesAutomotive batteries inside a distribution center in Mexico City.

When Americans turn in their old car batteries for recycling, they probably think they are doing good for the planet. And done well, recycling batteries is certainly environmentally responsible, since lead mining and processing cause far greater emissions of carbon dioxide than extracting lead from old car batteries for re-use.

But my article from Mexico should remind us that recycling can be “green” or not, depending on how it is done. That is particularly true of electronic waste, including batteries, where one goal of the recycling process is to extract precious metals. In much of the world, recycling is a big business with ties to gangs and organized crime. That is often the case with lead battery recycling plants in Mexico, that country’s officials told me.

The towns I visited housed lead battery recyclers whose practices were causing lead contamination in the surrounding areas because the recycling plants used primitive practices that allowed lead dust and fumes to escape. Scientific study is needed to define the magnitude of the problem, but lead that leaves recyclers puts children in the surrounding areas at risk of developmental delay, lowered I.Q. and other health problems.

So while you should feel good about recycling and make the effort to do it, we need to ask more about how our castoffs are processed. In much of the world the Basel Convention restricts or regulates the export of hazardous wastes to poorer countries. The United States never ratified that treaty.

Many environmental problems are incredibly hard to solve, like lowering greenhouse gas emissions. But ending the export of your used lead batteries to environmentally unsound plants in Mexico could be achieved pretty easily, by several means.

The government could simply ban used battery exports, as Slab Watchdog suggests. Or it could require that Mexican factories processing used batteries from the United States meet our environmental standards and undergo inspections. The Food and Drug Administration inspects foreign factories that make drugs imported into the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency could take on a similar role for battery recycling plants.

And in the meantime, consumers can get into the act, just as they have with sweatshop-free clothes or fair-trade coffee. Your old batteries have value and you can choose where to recycle them. So before you turn one in, ask where it will be recycled. Maybe then we’ll start to see signs in auto shops announcing: “100 percent of batteries recycled to U.S. EPA standards.”