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Read, Debate: Engage.
| topic: | Health and Sanitation |
|---|---|
| located: | Senegal, Kenya, Nigeria |
| editor: | Bob Koigi |
As the demand for lead batteries for both residential and industrial use globally skyrockets to unprecedented highs, lead poisoning, contamination and adverse impacts to the environment have reached epidemic proportions as lax regulations and failure to invest in recycling plants that are environmentally friendly complicate matters.
From contaminated soils near residential places that bordered a lead recycling plant in Kenya that had to be closed due to mounting threats, lead battery recycling factories poisoning workers and the neighbouring communities in Nigeria to children suffering from high lead contamination levels after being exposed to shocking toxic levels in Senegal and South Asia, the business of battery recycling remains lucrative at the detriment of ordinary citizens who have paid the ultimate price even as governments, and regulatory institutions pay lip service to enforcing compliance and advocating for transparency.
A report recently launched by UNICEF and Pure Earth posits that an estimated 800 million children globally have blood lead levels that require action with substandard and informal recycling of lead acid batteries being a major contributor of lead poisoning among children in low and mid income countries.
The United Nations Environment Assembly has been particularly vocal about what it sees as the increasing threat that lead battery recycling continues to pose to public health and the environment. It has even endorsed a resolution calling on the need to increase the capacity and infrastructure of recycling especially used lead acid batteries while taming the rate of emissions.
Such calls and a growing body of research that points to a worrying human health catastrophe that has exceeded the globally accepted health hazard levels should be treated with the seriousness they deserve. All industrial players, both in private and public sectors, should now more than ever, be alive to the lifelong and irreversible damages their inactions will cause to future generations and our environment.
Image by enriquelopezgarre
