Battery arm drives lead poisoning epidemic in Bangladesh
Philippe Alfroy
Mirzapur, Bangladesh (AFP) April 1, 2025
Junayed Akter, Bangladesh, is 12 years old, but his venous toxic lead makes him shorter by a few years.
Akter is one of 35 million children – about 60% of all children in South Asian countries – with high lead exposure.
The reasons vary, but his mother blamed his illness on a factory that hastily cancelled and recycled old vehicle batteries for profit to poison his air and the air and the earth in his small village.
“It will start at night and the whole area is filled with smoke. You may smell this special odor when you breathe.”
“In the season, fruits don’t grow up anymore. One day we even found two cows in my aunt’s house.”
Medical tests show that Junard’s blood is twice as high as the World Health Organization believes that it causes serious and potentially irreversible psychological disorders in young children.
“Since second grade, he doesn’t want to listen to us anymore, he doesn’t want to go to school,” said Beech. Her son sat next to her, staring blankly at their yard.
“He’s crying, too.”
Lead poisoning is not a new phenomenon in Bangladesh, and the causes are many phenomena.
They include the widespread use of heavy metals and continue to be used in paints, ignoring government bans, and are used as adulterants for turmeric spice powder to improve their color and perceived quality.
Many cases have been blamed on informal battery recycling plants that have surged nationwide due to growing demand.
Children with exposure to dangerous levels of intellectual and cognitive manifestations, anemia, developmental delay and lifelong neurological disorders.
The factory in the Axter Family Village was closed after ongoing complaints from the community.
But the environmental watchdog Pure Earth believes there may be 265 such locations elsewhere in the country.
“They broke the old battery, removed the lead and melted it to create a new battery,” Pure Mitali Das told AFP.
“They do all this in the open air,” she added. “The toxic smoke and acidic water produced during the surgery pollute the air, soil and water.”
– “They killed our village” –
In Fulbaria, a village a few hours north of the capital Dhaka, operations are in full swing at another battery recycling plant owned by a Chinese company.
On one side are green rice fields. On the other hand, a tube sprays blurry water into a salty swimming pool with dead land and thick orange dirt.
“As a kid, I brought food to my food when my father was in the fields. The landscape was grand, green, and the water was clear,” Rakib Hasan, 34, a engineer and local resident, told AFP.
“You see what you are now. It’s dead forever.” “They killed our village.”
Hassan complained about the pollution of the factory, prompting the judge to declare it illegal and order the power to be closed – a decision later reversed by the country’s Supreme Court.
“The factory was bought from local authorities,” Hassan said. “Our country is poor and many people are corrupt.”
Neither the company nor the Chinese Embassy in Dhaka responded to AFP’s request for comment on the factory business.
Syeda Rizwana Hasan of the Bangladesh Ministry of Environment of Helms declined to comment on the case because it is still in front of the court.
“We conduct regular operations against illegal production and recycling of batteries,” she said.
“However, given the scale of the phenomenon, these efforts are often insufficient.”
– “Don’t know the danger” –
Informal battery recycling is a booming business in Bangladesh.
It is driven primarily by the massive electrification of rickshaws, a previously pedal-driven mode of transportation that was popular in big cities and rural towns.
More than 4 million ricks of rickshaws were found on the roads in Bangladesh, and authorities estimate that the market will install all electric motors and batteries at around US$870 million.
“This is the downside of all electric,” said the Mayan of the United Nations Children’s Agency. The agency is adopting a strategy to clean up the industry with stricter regulations and tax benefits.
“Most people are not aware of the danger,” she said, adding that the impact of public health is expected to have a 6.9% impact on the national economy.
Muhammad Anwar Sadat of Bangladesh’s Ministry of Health warned that the country cannot ignore the scale of the problem.
“If we do nothing, the number of people affected will be multiplied by three to four times over the next two years,” he told AFP.
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