"The auto industry was warned: Battery recycling was poisoning people", 25 November 2025

...Phillip Toyne, [an] ... Australian lawyer, warned [Ford Motor Company] executives in 2005 that the lead inside car batteries was poisoning people.

Lead is an essential, but toxic, element of car batteries. As demand rose, the auto industry increased its use of recycled lead. But many recycling factories around the world were pumping toxic smoke into communities.

Toyne, records show, pitched ... a program in which inspectors would certify factories that operated cleanly. Car manufacturers and battery makers could then market themselves as buying only from environmentally friendly suppliers.

It went nowhere.

An investigation by The New York Times and The Examination showed that African factories have poisoned people while recycling lead to be sold to American companies. Children near one cluster of factories outside Lagos, Nigeria, had lead in their blood at levels that could cause lifelong brain damage, according to testing commissioned as part of the investigation.

Most carmakers, including Ford, declined to comment on the findings, saying that they rely on their suppliers to follow the law and corporate codes of conduct. A few companies, such as Volkswagen and BMW, promised to start internal reviews.

But records and interviews with industry executives and health and environmental advocates show that automakers and their suppliers have known for almost three decades that recyclers were releasing lead into the air as they melted down old batteries.

Time and again, car and battery manufacturers opted not to act and blocked efforts to address the problem. When the world’s largest car companies wrote their environmental policies, they excluded lead. They did so even as a patchwork of shoddy factories in Ghana, Nigeria and Tanzania provided more lead for their batteries.

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Ford did not respond to questions about Toyne’s pitch. But notes and documents summarizing the meetings show that executives were intrigued by the program, called Green Lead...

But the following year, 2006, Ford recorded what at the time was its worst financial loss ever. Bill Ford, a sustainability champion, stepped down as chief executive officer.

As the auto industry struggled through the subsequent financial crisis, other car companies and battery retailers also declined to sign on. Green Lead collapsed.

Battery makers buy some of their recycled lead from global trading companies, which buy from recyclers around the world.

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As the Green Lead initiative stalled in Detroit, another proposal was taking shape in India. In 2007, executives at Hero Honda, the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer at the time, realized that they would need ever more lead over the coming decade.

Executives knew what was likely to happen as a result. A company presentation said the consequences of increased lead production included “ill health of innocent persons / children.”

So the company, which was co-owned at the time by Honda Motor Co., signed on to a pilot program in India in which it would buy batteries only from manufacturers that had passed external audits and had been certified as reducing lead emissions.

The company hoped that would encourage competitors to invest in better technology, according to a corporate presentation.

The program was called BEST Standard 1001. The United Nations, which had provided funding to Green Lead, supported the initiative.

As with Green Lead, advocates lobbied carmakers around the world, hoping to take the project global.

“As you are aware, lead poisoning is an extremely serious issue in many parts of the world,” organizers wrote to car companies, including DaimlerChrysler and Ford.

None of them signed up.

Major Indian battery manufacturers also stayed away, said Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of OK International, a nonprofit health research organization that designed the project. 

Honda declined to comment on the program. It said it supported the ethical sourcing of materials and was “committed to the responsible management of the batteries of today and tomorrow.”

One company that declined to participate in the pilot program was Mitsubishi.

“We are aware of lead poisoning, and understand your gist,” Eizo Tabo, the manager of environmental and recycling programs at Mitsubishi, wrote at the time. But the company said its batteries came from Japan, not India. “We do not have extra resources to be involved in the overseas project for recycling lead batteries,” Tabo wrote.

In the years that followed, lead from polluting factories has seeped further into the global supply chain. Japan, for example, has imported recycled lead from Nigeria in the past decade, trade records show.

A Mitsubishi spokesperson said it is working to eliminate lead in its products and that it has not identified serious risks of human rights violations in any of its supply chains.

In December 2011, a New York Times article described a “putrid mist” falling upon a town in Mexico after a factory there began recycling old American car batteries... 

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...Bob Holcombe, ... a director with the General Services Administration, ... contacted a group called ASTM International and asked for help.

ASTM answers all kinds of complicated questions for governments and industries...

Holcombe asked ASTM to come up with standards for lead battery recycling.

No company had more at stake than Johnson Controls, the world’s largest automotive battery maker at the time. A new set of industry standards could have meant higher production costs and increased attention on its supply chain.

In early December 2012, battery makers, lobbyists and environmental advocates arrived at the G.S.A. office in Washington... They were there to vote on whether ASTM International should create a committee on battery recycling, the first step toward setting an industry standard.

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Of the 98 attendees listed as eligible to vote, 80 represented battery makers — including 50 representatives of Johnson Controls. The vote failed.

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Johnson Controls has since sold its battery business, which rebranded as Clarios. It did not answer questions about the meeting. “Clarios maintains an unwavering commitment to advancing stringent global standards for battery manufacturing and recycling,” the company said.

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The New York Times and The Examination asked 15 of the world’s largest carmakers to explain their position on lead. GM, Stellantis and Tesla did not respond to emails and phone calls. (Some electric vehicles still rely on lead batteries to power electrical systems. Tesla stopped using them in new cars, but still imports them for older models.) 

Other companies responded but did not answer questions from The Times and The Examination. Some pointed to broad commitments to buy or recycle all products responsibly. Volvo and Mitsubishi shared policies that do list lead among the metals they monitor. Nissan said its policy is to phase out the use of lead “where technically feasible.”

In July, Ford released its most recent sustainability report, announcing that it was “voluntarily holding itself accountable to a new level of rigor.” 

“Supply chain transparency and human rights protection go hand in hand,” Ford wrote.

The report says nothing about lead.

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