Though Mexico’s federal environmental agency has the power to shut down plants that violate environmental standards, agency documents show that officials temporarily closed parts of battery recycling plants just four times for air and soil contamination in the past 23 years. “We work with local health, safety, and environmental authorities to ensure our facilities are not only in compliance, but set the benchmark for our industry,” said the spokeswoman, Ana Margarita Garza-Villarreal. (The samples in the report were tested and analyzed by an independent laboratory.)Ī spokeswoman for Clarios said the company’s facilities use “strict safety protocols and we provide our employees with state of the art protective safety gear.” The world’s largest car battery maker, Clarios, which is based in Milwaukee, Wis., bought two plants in Monterrey in 2019, and the report found lead levels in soil outside its facilities that were well above the legal limit in Mexico of 800 parts per million. records showed.Īt recycling plants, lead is removed from batteries, ground up, melted and turned into ingots that are used to make new batteries. In 2021, more than 75 percent of all used U.S. records included in the study by the two groups. Over the past 10 years the number of car batteries shipped to Mexico from the United States has grown by nearly 20 percent, according to E.P.A. “They don’t get the training, they don’t get the equipment and they don’t get to operate in facilities that have adequate ventilation.”
“Workers in these plants are being poisoned day in and day out, and often without even their own knowledge of that,’’ said Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of Occupational Knowledge International. Mexico’s lax environmental laws and even more lax enforcement encourages American companies to offload used car batteries to the country, where labor is cheaper and unions are weaker, according to experts in labor rights and occupational health. The city of Monterrey, a three-hour drive from Texas, has become the largest source of used car batteries from the United States, with steady growth over the past decade in the shipment of used American batteries to Mexico, according to the U.S.
His supervisor at the facility, he said, insisted he keep working. González said, showed high levels of lead in his body experts agree that no level of lead is safe and over time it can result in neurological and gastrointestinal damage. González, 39, stacked the batteries, he said, near large containers of lead dust. The plant in Monterrey where he worked handled used car batteries, many from the United States, extracting lead as part of the process. Then came stomach pain, he said, followed by bouts of diarrhea. After returning home from his job at a car battery recycling plant in northern Mexico one evening in 2019, Azael Mateo González Ramírez said he felt dizzy, his bones ached and his throat was raspy.
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