THE ALARMING CONSEQUENCES OF INDONESIAN'S BATTERY RECYCLERS

Many Indonesian cities, towns and villages are home for battery recycling smelters pouring high doses of lead, plastic, and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere.

Indonesia is known for its important number of metalworking villages which have severely polluted the lands and injured people’s lives for decades. Even the modern smelters continue to pollute the air and the soil as they work without scrubbers to remove lead and other contaminants. Heavy smoke is spewing from industrial chimneys to land on rice fields over the countryside in Java. The inhabitants complain that the steam burn their eyes, makes them dizzy and gives them strong headaches

“We are upset about the smoke,” says Samsuri, 40, who lives in the farming village of Tegalwangi, about half a mile from the recycling compound, run by Lut Putra Solder. “It makes it difficult to breathe and sometimes makes us sick.”

Lead, the main element of vehicle batteries, has long been notorious to harm brains, even with low doses. However It is still difficult in Indonesia to remove well-know dangers from the industries. Local government says that they can’t shut down illegal smelters because too many people work they don’t want the operators to move somewhere else.

"The World Health Organization estimates that lead exposure contributes to 600,000 new cases a year of intellectual disabilities in children. Health experts say there is no safe exposure level for lead and that even relatively low levels can cause serious, sometimes irreversible, damage to developing brains."

Original article by the National Geographic

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