The angel Gabriel brings wondrous news to young Mary in this Sunday’s gospel: "Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.” The news is not so good for pregnant women in Mexico who live near lead recycling shops. Increasing numbers of spent batteries are shipped from the U.S. to poorly regulated shops for recycling, exposing workers and local residents to toxins that may cause birth defects and other damaging health effects.

The rising flow of batteries southward is a result of strict new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards on lead pollution, which make domestic recycling more difficult and expensive but do not prohibit companies from exporting the work and the danger to countries where standards are low and enforcement is lax.

Mexican environmental officials acknowledge that they lack the money, personnel, and technical capacity to police a fast-growing industry now operating in many parts of the country, often in dilapidated neighborhoods.

Batteries are imported through official channels or smuggled in to satisfy a growing demand for lead, once cheap and readily available but now in short global supply. Lead batteries are crucial to cellphone networks, solar power arrays, and the exploding Chinese car market, and the demand for lead has increased as much as tenfold in a decade.

An analysis of trade statistics shows that about 20 percent of spent American vehicle and industrial batteries are now exported to Mexico, up from 6 percent in 2007. About 20 million such batteries will cross the border this year, and that does not take into account batteries smuggled in as mislabeled metal scrap or second-hand goods. In September, more than 60 18-wheelers full of old batteries crossed the border each day, trade records show.

Lead interferes with neurological development and can cause high blood pressure, kidney damage, and abdominal pain in adults and developmental delays and behavioral problems in young children. When batteries are broken for recycling, the lead is released as dust and during melting as lead-laced emissions. Lead pollution remains in the ground for decades, further adding to the risk.

“If we export, we should only be sending batteries to countries with standards as strict as ours, and in Mexico that is not the case,” said Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of Occupational Knowledge International, a San Francisco group devoted to reducing lead exposure.

Source: An article by Elisabeth Rosenthal for the New York Times