Battery Boom Drives Bangladesh Lead Poisoning Epidemic
AFP/APP
Mirzapur, Bangladesh: Bangladeshi Junayed Akter is 12 years old, but the toxic lead coursing through his veins has left him with the diminutive stature of someone several years younger. Akter is one of 35 million children around 60 percent of all children in the South Asian nation who have dangerously high levels of lead exposure.
The causes are varied, but his mother blames his maladies on a now-shuttered factory that hastily scrapped and recycled old vehicle batteries, poisoning the air and soil of their small village.
“It would start at night, and the whole area would be filled with smoke. You could smell this particular odor when you breathed,” said Bithi Akter, his mother. “The fruit no longer grew during the season. One day, we even found two dead cows at my aunt’s house.”
Medical tests revealed that Junayed’s blood had twice the level of lead deemed by the World Health Organization to cause serious, likely irreversible, mental impairment in young children.
“From second grade onward, he didn’t want to listen to us anymore, he didn’t want to go to school,” Bithi said, as her son sat beside her, gazing blankly out at the courtyard of their home. “He cried all the time too.”
Lead poisoning is not a new phenomenon in Bangladesh, and its causes are manifold. These include the continued use of the heavy metal in paint, in defiance of a government ban, and its use as an adulterant in turmeric spice powder to improve its color and perceived quality.
A significant number of cases are also linked to informal battery recycling factories, which have proliferated around the country in response to rising demand.
Children exposed to dangerous levels of lead risk decreased intelligence, cognitive impairment, anemia, stunted growth, and lifelong neurological disorders. While the factory in the Akter family’s village closed after sustained complaints from the community, environmental watchdog Pure Earth estimates there could be 265 similar sites across the country.
“They break down old batteries, remove the lead, and melt it down to make new ones,” said Mitali Das from Pure Earth. “They do all this in the open air. The toxic fumes and acidic water produced during the operation pollute the air, soil, and water.”
‘They’ve Killed Our Village’
In Fulbaria, a village a few hours’ drive north of the capital Dhaka, another battery recycling factory, owned by a Chinese company, is fully operational. On one side, there are verdant paddy fields, while on the other, a pipe spews murky water into a brackish pool, surrounded by dead lands caked in thick orange mud.
“As a child, I used to bring food to my father when he was in the fields. The landscape was magnificent, green, and the water was clear,” said local resident and engineer Rakib Hasan. “You see what it looks like now. It’s dead, forever,” he added. “They’ve killed our village.”
Hasan had previously complained about the factory’s pollution, prompting a judge to declare it illegal and order it shut down. However, the country’s supreme court later reversed this decision.
“The factory bought off the local authorities,” Hasan said. “Our country is poor, many people are corrupt.”
Neither the company nor the Chinese embassy in Dhaka responded to AFP’s requests for comment on the factory’s operations.
Syeda Rizwana Hasan, who heads Bangladesh’s environment ministry, declined to comment on the case because it was still before the courts. She said, “We regularly conduct operations against the illegal production and recycling of electric batteries, but these efforts are often insufficient given the scale of the phenomenon.”
‘Unaware of the Dangers’
Informal battery recycling is a booming business in Bangladesh, largely driven by the mass electrification of rickshaws — a formerly pedal-powered means of transport popular in both large cities and rural towns. There are more than four million rickshaws on Bangladeshi roads, and authorities estimate the market for fitting them all with electric motors and batteries at around $870 million.
“It’s the downside of going all-electric,” said Maya Vandenant of the UN children’s agency, which is pushing for a strategy to clean up the industry with tighter regulations and tax incentives. “Most people are unaware of the dangers,” she added, noting that the public health impacts are forecast to cause a 6.9 percent dent in the national economy.
Muhammad Anwar Sadat of Bangladesh’s health ministry warned that the country could not afford to ignore the scale of the problem. “If we do nothing,” he told AFP, “the number of people affected will multiply three or fourfold in the next two years.”
