Lead for car batteries poisons an African town

Battery recycling leaves deadly levels of contamination, claims 18 children

…Thiaroye Sur Mer is a town of 100,000 where yearly rains leave people wading through knee-deep water inside their cement-block houses. A train track bisects the town and daily trains speed through just a few steps from homes. The ocean used to supply a livelihood, but fishing hasn’t been good the past few years. Young men have increasingly taken to trying to sneak into Europe aboard large canoes with outboard motors.

For years, the town’s blacksmiths extracted lead from car batteries and remolded it into weights for fishing nets. It’s a dangerous, messy process in which workers crack open the batteries with a hatchet and pull small pieces of lead out of skin-burning acid. The work left the dirt of Thiaroye dense with small lead particles.


Then the price of lead climbed, and traders from India came and asked about the dirt. They offered to buy bits of lead by the bag for 60 cents a kilogram, says Coumba Diaw, a middle-aged mother of two.

So Diaw dug up the dirt with a shovel and carried bags of it back to her house. There, she sat outside and separated out the lead with a sifter. It took just an hour of sifting to make what she did in a day of selling vegetables at the market. She kept her two daughters nearby as she worked.

Women all over the neighborhood did the same, creating dust clouds of lead.

Then sicknesses started. The deaths came, one after another, over the five months from October 2007 through March 2008.

MSNBC