This story is a co-publication with The Examination, a new nonprofit newsroom specializing in global public health reporting. Sign up to get the Examination’s investigations in your inbox. This story is also available in French.

At noon, dusk, and in the dead of night, Cyrille Traoré Ndembi grabs his phone and films his nearest neighbor.

The battery recycling factory roars, rattling Ndembi’s bed. Its chimneys belch smoke into the air, sending bitter odors through the windows of the family’s concrete home. Ndembi’s front garden, where his children play, is sprinkled with a black dust laced with lead — one of the most dangerous metals on the planet.

Ndembi calls one chimney “the tower of death.”

Since moving to Vindoulou, a sandy grid of shacks and homes off the main highway in the Republic of Congo, four years ago, Ndembi’s wife and daughters have suffered from pneumonia, bronchitis, and persistent coughs, medical records show.

“With lead, they say it’s a strong, slow poison,” said Ndembi, 59, who is fighting alongside his neighbors to have the factory moved or closed. “It kills little by little.”

The owner, Metssa Trading, came to Africa from India more than two decades ago under the name Metafrique, seizing upon cheap material, labor and some of the weakest social and environmental protections in the world.

The company is now one of Central Africa’s most prominent recyclers of used automotive batteries; boxes of plastic, chemicals, and metal that — when chopped to pieces and melted inside 2,000-degree Fahrenheit ovens — produce the lead essential to most cars on the road today.

Experts call battery recycling the most polluting industry in the world. At its worst, industry emissions — smoke, dust, chemicals, water runoff — contaminate the environment for generations and the body for a lifetime. The market in Africa is expected to grow to more than $6 billion within this decade.

Yet while India introduced its first lead battery rules requiring recycling companies to adopt safe practices in its own country more than 20 years ago, the Republic of Congo, like other countries in Africa, hasn’t done the same.

Now, officials in New Delhi are celebrating the charge of Indian operations into Africa, which include battery recycling facilities in at least eight countries. India recently dispatched one of its ambassadors in West Africa to inaugurate a plant that had been stockpiling lead batteries. Indian investments in Africa have grown by more than $20 billion in four years, officials say, and government funding for projects across the continent are on the rise. “The sky is the limit,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in August.

This support comes amid growing evidence that Indian lead recycling companies are among the top polluters on the continent and are poisoning nearby communities, an investigation by The Examination, The Museba Project in Cameroon, and Ghana Business News in Ghana has found.

One major Indian recycler was determined by scientists to have contaminated soil not far from schools and churches in West Africa by thousands of times the level that would require cleanup in the United States. Another company, named for an elephant-headed Hindu god, was briefly closed by authorities in Senegal after health violations. Residents in one Kenyan community have tried for years in local court to sue an Indian-owned company, alleging the factory caused sickness and death.

Metssa Trading, too, has come under fire. The Republic of Congo’s environment minister suspended operations here after the factory failed to submit an audit. In neighboring Cameroon, where the owner of Metssa Trading founded another battery recycling company, environment officials rated the plant zero out of 100 in terms of efforts to protect human health.

“Indian companies came to take advantage of our loose monitoring regime,” said John Pwamang, the former acting executive director of the Environmental Protection Agency of Ghana, where 3 of the 6 major battery recycling plants are Indian-operated. “They should invest in modern, cleaner technologies instead of trying to get lead cheaply and contaminating the environment.”

From Ghana to Cameroon, interviews and documents show, government officials repeatedly sided with companies and not the communities that complained of sickness. Officials have refused to share with the public everything from basic information about the results of inspections and cleanups to answers about why they allowed new homes to be built within meters of a factory, despite laws designed to protect human health. Authorities have witnessed unsafe practices, but declined to intervene, the news organizations found.

Corporations from Spain, Ireland, and the United States fuel the toxic ecosystem, buying tons of the dangerously produced goods, which dock in ports from Antwerp to Baltimore, records show.

To gauge the risk of Metssa’s operations, The Examination commissioned independent testing in the Republic of Congo and Cameroon.

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Lead levels in all blood samples taken from people living near the Vindoulou factory exceeded five micrograms per deciliter, the World Health Organization’s threshold for “action to reduce or end” the exposure.

Children fared the worst, with results many times higher than the WHO threshold. Doctors called the results “terrible” and “dangerous.”

In Cameroon, scientists gathered soil samples inside and outside a battery recycling plant in Douala. There, more than half of the results identified lead levels that experts agree pose a threat to human health.

“These are very worrying results,” said Gilbert Kuepouo, a geochemist who took the soil samples.

Days after The Examination questioned an environmental regulator in Cameroon about the plant’s activities, he inspected the factory and found problems with the emissions-filtering system. The company agreed to suspend operations and take steps to curb pollution, the regulator said.

The Examination based its reporting on the analysis of test results, lawsuits, videos, medical records, government inspections and correspondence, interviews, and visits to factories and nearby neighborhoods. The investigation drew on records from nine countries to document the expansion into Africa of battery recycling plants from India — the world’s largest democracy and one of its most influential economies.

Metssa’s owner, Arun Goswami, told The Examination the company operates in accordance with all government requirements. “In this global economy, people find opportunities and try to work hard to make their dreams come true wherever they can,” Goswami said.

Earlier this year, Ndembi darted through his neighborhood, accompanying a team of nurses carrying tourniquets and syringes. “Knock, knock!” Ndembi shouted, leading the nurses into the homes of his neighbors to gather what he considered evidence for the battle ahead.

“Our fight is to not leave an unhealthy environment for our offspring,” Ndembi said.

He watched as a nurse struggled to find veins in the tiny arms of his youngest daughter, Cyrfanie, a 15-month old whose favorite cartoon follows a mischievous French Donkey. The nurse instead pricked the sole of the little girl’s foot with a needle, drawing blood into a tube that was then sent to a laboratory overseas.

Ndembi was expecting bad news. The results were worse than he imagined.

Cheap, but deadly

Represented on the periodic table by the symbol Pb, lead has been making people sick for centuries.

Ancient Romans, who sweetened wine by boiling grapes in lead vessels, noticed regular drinkers became sluggish. Children and diners in 19th-century England became ill after eating candies and cheese laced with colorful lead pigment.

From the start of the 20th century, doctors and medical researchers reported that lead in paint and gasoline was linked to psychological conditions that in extreme cases required the use of straitjackets — and led to other illnesses and death.

Lead most often enters the body when someone breathes polluted air or swallows a tainted liquid or solid, like food, paint chips, soil, or dust.

Once in the system, lead moves through the bloodstream, settling in organs and teeth and breaking down cells that protect the entire body.

No amount of lead is safe for humans, although its effects can differ greatly. With the same level of lead in their blood, one person may complain of stomachaches, another may experience brain swelling, and a third may display no symptoms at all.

Exposure can cause brain and nerve damage and has been linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. At extremely high levels, lead can result in seizures and death. Children are especially vulnerable: One recent study calculated that, globally, lead may have cost young children hundreds of millions of IQ points in 2019 alone. 

Africa, by one measure, misses out on billions of dollars more than any other region each year in lost productivity caused by exposure to lead.

Recycling lead, a process present on every continent except Antarctica, has long been recognized as a serious public health threat.

“There are very few industries that are this hazardous to health or have this many costs to the general public,” said Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of San Francisco-based Occupational Knowledge International, who has studied battery recycling plants in more than a dozen countries.

Most recycled lead is used in batteries that power automobiles, motorbikes, cranes, and other pieces of equipment central to daily life, including millions of new cars that hit roads every year. Each car will, on average, use four lead batteries over its lifetime. Even most electric vehicles that run on newer lithium batteries still also contain traditional lead acid batteries.

Up to 99 percent of a traditional car battery can be reused, making it one of the most recycled products on the planet.

The lead can be “infinitely recycled,” according to the United Nations body that advises countries on hazardous waste. Recycling can also be cheaper than mining lead ore from the ground. Used battery acid can be dried into crystals to make glass and detergent. Plastic shells, ground into pellets, become planters, trash cans, or new battery casings.

But not all battery recycling operations are alike. There are more than 29,000 backyard recycling sites worldwide, including open-air scrap yards where adults and children work without government authorization or protective equipment, disassembling batteries by hand, thwacking them with machetes and draining acid onto the ground.

Gottesfeld said pollution-control technology makes all the difference and that plants in the United States, China, and elsewhere have improved in recent decades.

“We know this is feasible and doable,” Gottesfeld said of proper protocols. “It can be expensive, but it’s not rocket science.”

Blood tests and toxic dust

To map India’s battery footprint in Africa is to travel from the coastal swamps of Mozambique to mango farms in Nigeria, from small plants in the countryside to entire blocks in the heart of teeming cities.

In the Republic of Congo, Ndembi’s home is a 10-minute walk from National Highway Number 1, down paths of sand that cakes your shoes and toes.

One of Ndembi’s closest neighbors is a former soccer star, a father of four known as “The Knight.” Others are teachers, a veteran, and a retired journalist. Nearby, women sell dried fish outside tin-roofed homes. Blue paint shrivels on the walls of a hair salon named “The Beauty of Man.”

Metssa Congo (formerly Metafrique) moved into Vindoulou more than a decade ago at a time when the neighborhood was sparsely populated. As the years went by, more and more people built homes in the area. A school opened.

Ndembi first visited the neighborhood in 2019. He remembers seeing the factory, but said it stood silent and nobody mentioned any reason for worry. The company had held no public meetings about its activities.

The area was classified as “urban” at the time, official documents show.

Ndembi assumed things were safe.

It wasn’t long after he started building his two-story dream house that signs of trouble emerged.

First came an inspection by health officials who identified unsanitary working conditions in the plant and the risk of soil and air pollution. Months later, Metssa Congo paid $500 to the owner of a local bar who blamed the company for his daughter’s lung infection and who complained that emissions had corroded his roof. The bar owner took the money after promising to “never return to knock on the door” of the company or government officials, according to the agreement.

In 2020, the Republic of Congo’s environment minister halted activity at the plant, then quickly lifted the suspension on the condition the company comply with environmental standards. Soon after, three judges listened in a courtroom downtown as a father of 14 sued Metssa, alleging pollution had sickened him and his children. The man submitted a medical report confirming that his bronchitis was most likely caused by the inhalation of toxic smoke, court records show.

Last year, a team of consultants hired by the company to audit the plant found unhealthy levels of air pollution and warned “toxic dust” could cause cancer, damage to the nervous system, and lead poisoning.

Metssa Congo had no plans to manage risk, waste, or chemical products, according to the audit, obtained by The Examination. The recycling company also did not produce an impact assessment before starting work, the audit found. Such assessments have been required by law in the Republic of Congo since 2009.

“This is negligence on the part of the administration,” said Brice Sévérin Pongui, a Congolese attorney and environmental law specialist.

Pongui said the government sometimes compromises environmental and public safety for economic reasons, including the need for rapid job creation.

The audit acknowledged that the plant financially benefited the town and that its taxes helped the entire country.

Arsène Bisnault, whose consulting firm prepared a separate environmental review, told The Examination the factory should be relocated given the danger of its products.

Bisnault said he stopped work after Metssa Congo did not provide all the documents he requested to perform environmental safety checks. The company still owes him money, Bisnault said.

Earlier this year, Ndembi took the long journey into town to retrieve results of the blood tests. He had spent enough time learning about lead to suspect something was wrong, Ndembi said, but was surprised by his daughters’ results, especially that of the baby, Cyrfanie. Her lead level was the highest in the family.

“I was very upset, very angry,” Ndembi said. “No one in my household was spared.”

Cyrfanie’s test showed more than 53 micrograms of lead — nine times higher than the World Health Organization’s recommendations for intervention.

At that level, according to widely cited standards published by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a child should undergo an X-ray, a neurological exam, and consider admission to a hospital. For anything above 45 micrograms per deciliter, the New York State Department of Health says, “Your child needs medical treatment right away.”

Experts say Cyrfanie is likely to experience significant lifelong impacts. Learning disabilities and brain damage are among the risks at her level of exposure.

One of Ndembi’s other daughters, 8-year-old Cyrielle, also had a result above 45 micrograms per deciliter. Ndembi’s own result was close behind.

The body’s normal blood lead level is zero micrograms per deciliter, said Dr. Brian Schwartz, a professor at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. “That is none, nada, zilch, zero.”

Ndembi said he doesn’t have money for medical care. The treatment often recommended for severe lead poisoning, known as chelation, can be expensive and the clinic that collected the blood samples said it knew of no available treatment in the Republic of Congo. In any case, the World Health Organization advises that chelation is of limited value when children continue to be exposed to lead.

To better understand risks to the lead recycling plant’s neighbors, The Examination commissioned 10 additional blood tests from people who live near the plant and had them analyzed by a laboratory in France.

Of the four children tested, all had extremely elevated lead levels. The level in one 13-year-old boy, who lives behind the plant, had increased since his first test four months earlier to more than 40 micrograms per deciliter. Another boy, 10 years old, had a result of nearly 46.

Schwartz called the results “outrageous.”

“The key is to eliminate any further exposure,” he said.

In a statement, Goswami, 56, denied Metssa Congo had contributed to elevated lead levels, saying testing done by the local health department “indicated no long-term health effects associated with our operations.” Goswami declined to provide details or documentation about the tests.

The Republic of Congo’s Ministry of Health did not respond to messages, phone calls, and a hand-delivered letter requesting further information.

Goswami said Metssa Congo operates “in strict compliance with internationally recognized industry standards and the approval of the Congolese government,” adding the company increased the height of its chimneys and made other improvements in 2020, following government recommendations.

He acknowledged the factory started operating before receiving permits, but said it had permission to do so and that the company now has “all the environmental clearances.”

Goswami rejected the audit’s finding of “toxic dust” and said photos and videos taken outside the plant show smoke from aluminum recycling, not lead. Furnaces have protections to “effectively collect, neutralize, and filter emissions before their release,” he said.                                                   

Goswami, born in Meerut, India, said he has lived in Africa for 28 years and his businesses have created about 500 jobs. “I have never sought to take advantage of weaker regulations and enforcements,” Goswami said. He said the company has asked the Congolese government to help it find a new location for the plant in Vindoulou.

Arlette Soudan-Nonault, the Republic of Congo’s environment minister, spoke to The Examination in August, promising answers to questions about the plant's operations. “I will do the best I can,” she later wrote via WhatsApp. But she ultimately did not respond to the questions or to subsequent phone calls or messages.

The Republic of Congo’s health minister did not respond to requests for interviews. Paul Adam Dibouilou, a senior official appointed by country’s autocratic president to oversee the region that includes Vindoulou, said he cared deeply about the health of his fellow citizens but was “dubious” about allegations of high lead levels among residents.

India’s ambassador to the Republic of Congo, Madan-Lal Raigar, declined to answer questions or comment about what, if anything, India is doing to help protect the health of Congolese citizens from Indian-owned companies.

'Victory to India'

The lead recycling plant in Cameroon is separated from neighboring Congo by hundreds of miles of rainforest. It sits inside an industrial zone in the country’s largest city, Douala — a zone that Cameroon’s authoritarian government created by evicting hundreds of families, carving out more than 100 hectares in the center of town.

It was here at the start of the century that Goswami founded Metafrique Cameroun, one of the country’s largest traders of lead and other metals. In 2013, photos shared by the company on social media show men in dress shirts and South Asian kurtas at the plant watching a manager hoist the flags of Cameroon and India. One man saluted. Others stood to attention. “Victory to India,” Facebook users wrote.

That same year, a group of environmental journalists published a report that accused the battery recycling company, Metafrique Cameroun, of sickening employees and residents near the plant. None of the chimneys had filters, essential to reducing public exposure to toxic byproducts from melting lead,  according to the report. Locals complained of coughs, nausea, and rashes, the journalists wrote.

“The activities of your company operate in violation of the laws of the republic and constitute a real threat to the lives of the people,” then-member of the national assembly, Isaac Ngahane, wrote to Metafrique after the news report.

In 2018, a team of university academics and scientists published the largest-ever study in Africa on the contamination of soil by lead battery recycling companies. Soil, experts say, is a major problem because lead can be swallowed by children playing outside or inhaled in dust tracked into the home on clothes or shoes.

Of the 15 companies in Africa from which soil was tested inside and outside plant premises, 8 were owned or operated by Indians and Indian firms, The Examination found. (Of those remaining, most were locally owned, records show.)

Soil tested outside the battery recycling plant owed by Metafrique returned the highest result within Cameroon and the third-highest in Africa, the study showed. That result — 19,000 milligrams of lead per kilogram — is almost 50 times higher than what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, considers a baseline for removing contaminated soil from residential neighborhoods.

A year later, officials inspected the plant, rating it zero out of 100 for efforts to control air pollution and to address health complaints by neighbors, according to a draft report obtained by The Examination. Protecting the health of residents was the only area in which Metafrique had made no progress since operations began, according to the draft report.

Goswami said the factory had installed equipment “to ensure no gaseous or particulate matter is emitted” and he did not recall the earlier news report or communications with Ngahane, the Cameroonian politician.

“We have always been compliant with local standard regulations and legal requirements of the country we are operating in,” Goswami said.

Goswami said he and his family sold their interests in Metafrique Cameroun years ago and no longer have any interest in the company. He declined to identify the buyer, citing a nondisclosure agreement.

Cameroonian records indicate Goswami finalized in 2019 the transfer of his interests in Metafrique Cameroun to a company in the United Arab Emirates, a tax haven where the identity of owners is not made public.

This summer, a reporter for The Examination jumped into a truck with a Cameroonian geochemist, following a hazardous waste expert from the environment ministry through busy traffic to the Metafrique Cameroun plant.

“Usually when we come, we are not coming in peace,” said William Lemnyuy, the ministry official.

Over the next hour, Lemnyuy, who has represented Cameroon at United Nations’ conferences on the regulation of toxic products, wandered through the plant as workers in boots and red gloves hacked away with machetes at piles of used batteries.

Pointing to the chimney, Lemnyuy said he saw no evidence of a filter between it and the furnace. Experts consider a simple fabric filter as the bare minimum to help remove the most dangerous emissions.

“It looks like things are being done like they were 100 years ago,” Lemnyuy said.

Nearby, Kuepouo, the geochemist and executive director of the nonprofit Research and Education Center for Development, scraped topsoil into bags, sending them to an overseas laboratory for lead analysis.

The Examination paid scientists to collect and analyze soil samples from inside the plant and up to 275 meters away.

Kuepouo started work bent over a strip of earth where rocks, a fabric sack, and an old BMW part lay in trash piles. He and a colleague then fanned out west, past lunch kiosks and crowded homes to the local high school, a complex of concrete buildings where mold streaks the walls. As a final stop, the scientists headed northeast from the plant, down a muddy path, to collect soil near a health clinic run by a Bolivian nun.

“We can definitely say soil contamination is coming from the plant,” Kuepouo said after reviewing the results. Soil from inside the factory showed lead at more than 70 times the level at which the U.S. EPA recommends cleaning up an industrial site. Other samples, including those taken near women grilling and selling corn near the factory, were six to eight times higher than what the U.S. agency considers a threat to public health. Lead in soil near the health clinic and school did not rise to levels of concern, according to the analysis.

Testing soil helps establish a pattern: If lead levels decrease farther from a plant, the more likely it is the plant is the source, scientists say.

Kuepouo said the results showed higher levels of lead than previous testing. “Things are getting worse,” he said.

Lemnyuy said some companies in the industrial zone where Metafrique Cameroun operates have improved their efforts to stop lead and other particles from raining down on surrounding communities, installing systems to cover and capture smoke and gas. Metafrique Cameroun, he said, has not.

The current approach of Cameroonian regulators is to work with industry, not penalize it, he said.

“It’s like beating a child because he or she is wetting the bed,” Lemnyuy said. “If you just keep on beating the child, the child might not feel like you are really helping. … It’s the same thing with the industry.”

Ahmed Jaber, director general of Metafrique Cameroun, said the company uses high-quality filters that are replaced every six months as well as other equipment to control pollution. Responding to questions about Lemnyuy’s July inspection, Jaber said, “Filters were under maintenance as some bags would have been worn out or destroyed by too much heat during the time of the visit.”

Jaber also denied the findings of the 2019 inspection and said reports made no reference to health hazards. He did not share reports.

The same day, Kuepouo and Lemnyuy visited the two other battery recycling facilities in Douala — both Indian-operated. Tests from soil inside and outside these facilities also showed elevated lead levels.

The ministers of health and environment in Cameroon did not respond to phone calls and letters seeking an interview. Albert Mambo, a Health Ministry official responsible for Douala, told The Examination he had no information about battery recycling plants.

“Our concern is more like tropical diseases or emerging illnesses,” he said. “There has to be an order of priority,” Mambo said of lead.

Earlier this year, Metafrique Cameroun exported lead to Spain, Ireland, and other countries. Containers of lead from Metssa Congo, owned by Goswami, arrived last month via cargo ship in the Port of Baltimore. The recipient was Trafigura Trading LLC, the U.S. subsidiary of the global trading giant Trafigura, trade records show.

The records do not indicate where the lead went after arriving in the United States, and Trafigura declined to comment on its destination.

Responding to questions about community complaints against Metssa Congo, a Trafigura spokesperson said, “We take these allegations very seriously and are investigating this further.”

'Local Chernobyl'

Other Indian-operated battery recycling companies in Africa have drawn criticism from officials, scientists, and community members.

Of those, none is more conspicuous than Gravita India Ltd.

“Our operation is mostly in Africa,” an executive told shareholders earlier this year. A major Indian research firm has called Africa the company’s “crown jewel,” pointing to growing profits and favorable government policies. Gravita recently reported global revenue worth more than $336 million.

In 2011, officials in Senegal faulted the company for failing to adopt dozens of safety recommendations, according to media reports. The plant, located in a town that is home to an orphanage and a children’s hospital, was a “local ‘Chernobyl,’” one resident wrote. The company denied responsibility for any sickness or pollution, media reported. The plant has since been moved.

In 2013, government scientists in Ghana and academics found lead levels within the Gravita factory to be thousands of times higher than the average level within U.S. industrial sites. A second study years later also found unsafe levels of lead in soil on company premises.

“They came in at a time when everyone thought that recycling was good and should not be regulated,” Kwame Aboh, the former deputy director general of the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, said of Gravita. Aboh participated in the 2013 study with other scientists at the commission, which runs a soil research center. He worried about workers he saw using sledge hammers to break batteries. “I think we were all a bit lax,” Aboh said.

Pwamang, Ghana’s former environmental chief, told The Examination the agency ordered Gravita to decontaminate the site and relocate. “But they didn’t do a cleanup as such,” Pwamang said. “That site is still highly contaminated.”

Gravita did not respond to emails seeking comment or a letter delivered to its Ghana office.

Back in Senegal, near the farming village of Ndiakhatt, sits a battery recycling company named after Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god.

Residents who live near the plant fear sickness and death, a repeat of the worldwide scandal years ago when 18 Senegalese children died from brain injuries thought to be caused by long-term exposure to lead from an unauthorized recycling operation. 

Last year, the environment ministry in Senegal ordered the suspension of Ganesha’s plant after an inspection showed the company started work without necessary environmental protections, according to a letter obtained by The Examination. Officials also found elevated lead levels in soil during the inspection, the letter stated, adding “the alarming pollution situation observed on the site requires urgent measures to stop activities.” Authorities have since allowed operations to resume.

“We will not wait for the death of our children to react,” locals protested in May, marching to demand the permanent closure of the plant.

An employee of Ganesha Senegal denied wrongdoing, saying the closure was due to a misunderstanding. He said Ganesha’s competitors were behind the complaints, but declined to identify the companies responsible.

“We are not polluting the environment,” said the employee, who declined to give his name. “If we are doing any violation of the environmental law, then how are we allowed to start again?”

The environment minister of Senegal did not respond to phone calls and messages seeking interviews.

Dead-end in India

Indian Prime Minister Modi has made doing business in Africa and close relationships with its people a cornerstone of his foreign policy.

In September, Modi hugged the president of the African Union, the regional bloc representing every country on the continent, announcing the union had gained membership in the G20, a forum of the world’s most influential economies.

“When we say we see the world as a family, we truly mean it,” Modi said earlier this year.

Yet people in Africa say they don’t feel like family and instead face formidable barriers to seeking recourse from New Delhi.

India — unlike the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and other major corporate hubs — has no specific legal tool for victims of corporate misbehavior overseas. Even China, which has long faced accusations that its homegrown firms have harmed human health, earlier this year authorized foreigners to seek justice from certain Chinese companies operating overseas.

In 2016, residents of Mombasa, an ancient trading city in Kenya sued an Indian-owned battery recycling plant that had long stood accused of causing locals to collapse from kidney failure, writhe from diarrhea, and lose their memory. At least 20 people had died and stillborn fetuses looked sooty, locals said.

Neighbors in Mombasa filed the lawsuit against Metal Refinery EPZ Ltd. as well as government agencies that allowed the battery plant to operate.

The company did not respond to the lawsuit, records show.

“We attempted to trace them in India … but it was impossible,” said Phyllis Omido, a community leader who faced down anonymous threats and government pressure to end the legal campaign. “We had no help from the Indian consulate here, and the Indian authorities were not helpful.

Indian authorities did not respond to emails, faxes, or phone calls seeking comment. The plant in Mombasa has since closed.

In 2020, a judge in Kenya awarded residents $12 million. In June, an appeals court overturned the ruling and ordered a retrial.

India wasn’t always so quiet in the face of corporate abuses by foreign-owned businesses.

One midnight in December 1984, plumes of poisonous gas escaped from a factory in Bhopal, India, that was owned by a Connecticut-based chemical manufacturer.

Thousands were killed by methyl isocyanate, which drowned some in their own bodily fluids and caused the hearts of others to stop. At least 15,000 people died and half a million were blinded, disabled, or sickened in what is one of the worst industrial accidents in history.

Indian officials filed criminal charges against the local company and its managers as well as the U.S. parent company and its chief executive Warren Anderson.

To reach Anderson, the Indian government published a notice in the Washington Post, summoning him to appear in court. Anderson refused, and the case dragged on.

“The tragedy was caused by the synergy of the very worst of American and Indian cultures,”  Bhopal Chief Judicial Magistrate Prakash Mohan Tiwari wrote years later. “An American corporation cynically used a third-world country to escape from the increasingly strict safety standards imposed at home.”

The U.S. government declined to extradite Anderson, who died in 2014.

The response to the catastrophe in Bhopal paved the way for other lawsuits by victims of corporate harms that continue today. In one unsuccessful case, victims of a government massacre in the Democratic Republic of Congo attempted to sue a mining company in Australia and Canada for allegedly providing trucks and provisions to soldiers.

Thousands of Nigerians living near oil pipelines are seeking compensation in an ongoing case from the London headquarters of Shell, arguing the company controlled a subsidiary that poisoned land and groundwater.

Residents of the Zambian city of Kabwe are suing a South African mining company for alleged lead poisoning. Plaintiffs allege the company knew of health risks while operating a lead mine in Kabwe, which researchers have called “the world’s most toxic town.” The case is ongoing.

Victories are rare and hard-fought. But experts say formal avenues for complaints, in courtrooms or beyond, can be worthwhile. Fifty-one countries, from the United States to Morocco, have so-called “national contact points,” government-backed bodies with the power to investigate complaints of corporate wrongdoing abroad. Contact points have no enforcement powers but can make recommendations and help in negotiations between a company and individuals or communities.

“As the overseas footprints expand and human rights abuses linked to Indian companies get exposed, I expect the Indian government to come under increasing pressure to proactively regulate conduct of such companies,” said Surya Deva, law professor at Macquarie University in Australia and a former member of the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights.

For now, the residents of Vindoulou are pressing their case in local court. More than 150 people joined a lawsuit in June, asking a judge to recognize the dangers they face, shut down the company, and force it to relocate. The judge dismissed that case in September, holding the civil court had no power to rule on administrative matters.

Last month, Ndembi and neighbors filed a fresh lawsuit before an administrative court, seeking — once again — an order that Metssa Congo stop operations and compensate those with elevated lead levels in their blood. “There is an emergency and time is of the essence,” an attorney for the residents wrote.

At home, Ndembi and his family still cough during the day and wake at night from the noise. With limited Internet connection, Ndembi figures the best thing he can do is stand in his garden with his phone, filming the factory as its chimneys darken the sky.

One day, he hopes, the videos will make a difference.

This story was produced by:

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indian companies are bringing one of the world’s most toxic industries to Africa. People are getting sick. on Dec 4, 2023.

Amid growing pressure to address the global plastic pollution crisis, many companies are turning to plastic credits — tradable units that represent some amount of plastic litter that’s been removed from the environment. This is convenient for companies that find it too difficult or expensive to reduce the amount of plastic that goes into their products and packaging. Instead, they can buy credits and say they’ve “offset” their plastics footprint.

Plastic credits’ proponents say they open up a critical funding stream for waste management in the developing world, enabling the collection of low-quality plastic waste that would otherwise have remained litter. Verra, a nonprofit that runs one of the world’s biggest plastic crediting programs, says credits can advance “plastic stewardship goals” and “accelerate the transition to a circular economy for plastics” — a system that conserves resources and minimizes waste generation. 

But environmental advocates and experts are concerned that credits justify ongoing plastic production and distract from more aggressive policies to make producers responsible for waste management. Now, there’s evidence that some plastic credits are funding cleanup programs that were already in operation long before the credits came along, calling the credits’ utility into question.

According to a recent report co-published by the nonprofits Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, or GAIA, and Break Free From Plastic, many projects in the pipeline to certification from Verra do not involve “additional” waste cleanup, beyond what would have happened in the absence of the plastic credits. Out of 41 plastic collection and recycling projects listed in Verra’s database at the time of the report’s analysis, only three had been issued plastic credits that they could then sell to buyers. Of those, two projects were issued credits earlier this year, but for cleanup activities that began in 2019 or 2020. The third was issued credits in 2022 for activities dating back to 2020.

What’s more, at the time of the report’s analysis, 83 percent of the projects that had applied for Verra’s certification — but that hadn’t yet been fully approved — had already been in operation for more than a year. If approved, 42 percent will have been in operation for more than five years. This means the majority of the projects were already functioning without any revenue from Verra’s plastic crediting mechanism.

“What it seems like is happening is that whatever plastic is being picked up was already being picked up,” said Neil Tangri, GAIA’s science and policy adviser. These waste collection projects did not need plastic credits to operate, he added.

This problem is familiar territory for anyone who’s been following the voluntary carbon market, which shares many features — and flaws — with the fledgling market for plastic credits. Recent investigations have shown that many credits exchanged on the carbon market are essentially “junk,” representing emissions reductions that would have happened whether or not a crediting system existed. Verra, which controls two-thirds of the world’s voluntary carbon market in addition to its newer plastic crediting program, has fallen under particularly intense scrutiny for its rainforest-based carbon credits. One investigation found that more than 90 percent of these credits do not represent real emissions reductions, because the areas of rainforest they’re tied to were never at risk of deforestation in the first place. (Verra disputes the findings and has recently updated its methodology for forest-based carbon offsets.)

In both cases, the plastic credit market and the carbon market, additionality has proven to be the “Achilles’ heel of the entire offset idea,” Tangri said. Proving additionality requires constructing a counterfactual — a “sci-fi universe in which your project does not exist.” And opinions on what that universe looks like vary widely.

For plastic cleanups, Verra asks project developers to demonstrate additionality by passing at least one of three tests. The first and easiest test automatically qualifies a project as additional if it is located in a least-developed country or a small island developing state, as defined by the United Nations, or in an underdeveloped region of a wealthier country. If a project fails that test, it can demonstrate additionality if it has a “penetration rate” of less than 20 percent, meaning it collects less than 20 percent of the total amount of waste generated in the host country. Finally, if a project developer can’t meet either of those conditions, it can run an “investment analysis” to demonstrate that its project is not “economically or financially attractive.”

Normally, Verra requires projects to self-report that they’ve met an additionality criterion prior to being listed on the plastic credit registry. Projects have to validate their planned activities with a third-party auditor within two years of their start date. Then, once they’ve started collecting waste, they have to verify with an auditor that they’ve really collected that waste, before finally being approved by Verra itself. This order of operations means credits can only be issued for projects that have already started. 

But Verra said it made a one-time exception to the two-year rule at the launch of its plastic crediting program in 2021. According to a spokesperson, Verra allowed projects with start dates on or after January 1, 2016, to register “if they were able to demonstrate additionality and conformance with all Plastic Program requirements by the end of December 2023.” The spokesperson said that the 2016 start date was chosen because it aligned with the release date of the New Plastics Economy, an initiative from the nonprofit Ellen MacArthur Foundation to advance a circular economy for plastics.

“Verra has a robust validation and verification process that ensures the integrity of the projects registered in Verra’s Plastic Program,” the spokesperson added.

Experts question Verra’s logic, however. Alix Grabowski, director of plastics and material science for the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund, called the organization’s first two criteria “proxies” for additionality — straightforward ways of evaluating a project without having to run a complicated investment analysis. Proxies aren’t intrinsically bad, she said, but Verra’s seem to encourage generalizations about countries’ waste management infrastructure. “Every place is different,” she told Grist, suggesting the need for “due diligence” to consider more than just a given project’s location in the developing world when deciding whether it would have existed absent the crediting system.

More broadly, Grabowski criticized plastic credits for failing to produce a pipeline of investable waste collection projects. By design, projects that meet Verra’s third additionality criterion — the “investment analysis” showing they aren’t financially attractive — have to remain reliant on the plastic crediting mechanism. “Should we really be putting time, money, and investment into credits if they’re designed to never scale?” she said.

As for the timing of plastic credits, Axel Michaelowa, a senior founding partner at the consulting firm Perspectives Climate Group, told the report authors that it was “perverse” to retroactively generate credits from waste collection projects that began several years ago. In 2016, he said, “nobody was talking about plastic credits, so it is inconceivable that these projects were planned taking into account the revenue from plastic credits.”

Notably, Verra didn’t start developing its Plastic Program until 2018. It was part of a group of organizations that worked together over three years to develop three market-based approaches to dealing with plastic pollution. 

Sebastian DiGrande, CEO of the Plastic Credit Exchange, or PCX — a company that both certifies projects with its own accreditation standard and sells plastic credits — said he didn’t want to criticize Verra’s methodologies. But he said his organization does not issue credits for cleanups that occurred more than a year ago. “We don’t go back five, six years,” he told Grist. “We just don’t. We cut it off for work done in the last 12 months.”

Many plastic crediting organizations, including Verra and PCX, are advocating for plastic credits to play a role in the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, which is scheduled to be finalized by the end of next year. Credits “can be used to bring financing anywhere it is needed,” they wrote in a joint statement last year. The Verra spokesperson clarified that plastic credits should not be a “substitute for upstream actions,” meaning that companies should use them in addition to their efforts to reduce the amount of plastic they produce. They also said Verra does not support terms like “plastic offsetting” or “plastic neutrality” because they “oversimplify plastic stewardship and do not appropriately convey the environmental impact of this mechanism.” 

Grabowski, who was on a technical committee that helped Verra design its plastic program standards, said she recommended explicit guardrails against these terms but was rebuffed by the organization. “Their response was that they didn’t have control over that,” she told Grist, even though neutrality claims are “the main reason” companies are interested in buying credits. “There’s an element where they’re enabling it while saying they don’t support it,” she added.

Worried following the failures of the voluntary carbon market, environmental advocates are calling for a different approach, while still acknowledging the need to pick up waste in places where it’s harming people and ecosystems.

One option, Tangri suggested, could involve a tax on all plastic-producing companies, with the proceeds going toward plastic cleanup, disposal in controlled landfills, and recycling where applicable. Such a system could be included in countries’ national action plans under the global plastics treaty, or implemented outside the treaty process. The most important thing, he said, is that it “doesn’t rely on the good will of companies to fund projects in certain kinds of charismatic, touristy places.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Plastic credits are supposed to support new cleanup projects. Do they? on Dec 4, 2023.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

A next-generation geothermal plant backed by Google has started sending carbon-free electricity to the grid in Nevada, where the tech company operates some of its massive data centers.

On Tuesday, Google and geothermal developer Fervo Energy said that electrons began flowing from the first-of-a-kind facility earlier this month. The 3.5-megawatt project, called Project Red, is now supplying power directly to the Las Vegas–based utility NV Energy.

The announcement comes more than two years after Google and Fervo signed a corporate agreement to develop the ​“enhanced geothermal” plant. Unlike conventional geothermal plants, which tap into heat found close to the earth’s surface, Houston-based Fervo uses advanced drilling techniques to access resources that are deeper or trickier to reach than hot springs or geysers.

The pilot project’s completion is a meaningful step in the growing global effort to harness the Earth’s heat. 

In the United States, geothermal energy supplies only about 3,700 megawatts (3.7 gigawatts) of electricity, or 0.4 percent of total U.S. electricity generation last year. But according to the U.S. Department of Energy, geothermal could provide potentially 90 gigawatts of firm and flexible power to America’s grid by 2050 — assuming that enhanced systems like Fervo’s catch on as a widespread renewable energy option.

Fervo’s project has a relatively small capacity: enough to power roughly 2,600 U.S. homes at once. Still, that’s more electricity than any of the world’s 40-some enhanced geothermal systems have previously achieved, according to the company.

Google said it inked the agreement in May 2021 as part of a larger strategy to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels. The prior year, the search-engine giant set a target of operating all of its power-hungry data centers and office campuses worldwide on ​“24/7 carbon-free energy” by 2030, a goal that requires not just purchasing renewable power but also accelerating the development of innovative energy technologies.

“When we began our partnership with Fervo, we knew that a first-of-a-kind project like this would require a wide range of technical and operational innovations,” Michael Terrell, Google’s senior director of energy and climate, wrote in a November 28 blog post.

“The result is a geothermal plant that can produce round-the-clock [carbon-free energy] using less land than other clean energy sources,” he said, adding that Google ​“worked closely with Fervo to overcome obstacles and prove that this technology can work.”

Google declined to share financial details about its agreement with Fervo or the cost of the electricity that Project Red is producing.

Drilling deep for clean energy 

Geothermal resources are available virtually everywhere underground, representing a potentially vast supply of clean electricity and industrial heat. Yet most of those resources are too deep or technically complicated to reach cost-effectively using traditional methods.

Fervo, which has raised more than $180 million since 2017, is among dozens of companies in the U.S. and worldwide that are striving to develop easier and cheaper ways of unleashing this geothermal potential.

The startup uses horizontal drilling techniques and fiber-optic sensing tools gleaned from the oil and gas industry. Technicians create fractures in hard, impermeable rocks found far below the Earth’s surface, then pump the fractures full of water and working fluids. The super-hot rocks heat those liquids, eventually producing steam that drives electric turbines. The idea is to create geothermal reservoirs in places where naturally occurring resources aren’t available.

In recent years, enhanced geothermal projects in a handful of other countries were shut down after triggering earthquakes and rattling surrounding cities. Since then, companies have stepped up efforts to monitor and mitigate induced seismicity. Fervo said it had adopted a protocol developed by DOE to avoid causing seismic events at its project sites. 

The startup first began drilling in Humboldt County, Nevada in early 2022. Project Red was initially anticipated to be a 5-megawatt facility that would come online last year.

At the geothermal site, two wells reach 7,700 feet deep and then connect with horizontal conduits stretching some 3,250 feet long. Fervo’s team flows fluid into the project’s artificial reservoir, where the liquid can reach temperatures of up to 376 degrees Fahrenheit. In July, Fervo announced that it successfully completed a full-scale well test in Nevada that confirmed the commercial viability of its next-generation technology. 

Roughly four months later, its first power plant is officially up and running.

“We did what we set out to do,” Sarah Jewett, Fervo’s vice president of strategy, said in an email to Canary Media. 

Through the agreement with Google, ​“We proved our drilling technology, established Project Red as the most produced enhanced geothermal system in history, and delivered carbon-free electrons to the grid at a time when competing clean, firm energy developers have struggled to execute their projects,” she said.

To boost America’s geothermal capacity, the DOE has set a goal of slashing the cost of power from enhanced geothermal systems to $45 per megawatt-hour by 2035 — a 90 percent drop from today’s prices. Fervo currently produces power at a ​“significantly” higher cost than the DOE’s target, Tim Latimer, the company’s CEO, told Utility Dive in July. Still, he said the startup remains on track to hit $45 per MWh in the coming years as it scales its technology.

On that point, Fervo is already getting started on a 400-megawatt geothermal power plant in Beaver County, Utah, called Cape Station. This summer, Fervo began drilling the first of what will become 100 geothermal wells for the project, which is expected to start delivering 24/7 electricity to the grid in 2026 and reach full-scale production in 2028, Jewett said.

Google, for its part, said it will continue working with Fervo and other companies to accelerate the commercialization of advanced clean energy technologies. In September, the tech giant formed a partnership with Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit that aims to expand the use of geothermal energy worldwide. Google said it will lend its data and software capabilities to help develop a tool for mapping and assessing global geothermal resources. 

“For geothermal to grow over the coming decades, we need big players with global scale and breakthrough technological solutions focused on this massive clean energy resource beneath us,” Jamie Beard, executive director of Project InnerSpace, said in an earlier statement about the Google partnership.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline America’s first ​‘enhanced’ geothermal plant just got up and running on Dec 3, 2023.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES — Methane concentrations in the atmosphere are rising, and the oil and gas industry is responsible for nearly a third of global methane emissions. The greenhouse gas is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over its first 20 years in the atmosphere, and it’s responsible for a quarter of the temperature increase that has already taken place. At COP28, the annual United Nations climate conference taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the United States announced that it has finalized regulations to tackle this pressing problem. 

On Saturday, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule to reduce methane emissions from the U.S. oil and gas industry, which is responsible for about 12 percent of global methane emissions from the sector. Methane is the main component of natural gas, and it leaks from every phase of oil and gas production, from extraction to transport to refining. The new rule requires oil field companies to monitor for leaks, fix them promptly, and phase out the practice of burning off natural gas into the atmosphere — a process called flaring. They must also minimize venting, the deliberate release of natural gas, during certain processes. The rule allows third parties, including environmental and watchdog groups, to monitor oil and gas sites and report violations. 

The EPA estimates that the long-awaited rule will prevent 58 million tons of methane emissions between 2024 and 2038, the emission reductions equivalent to taking 28 million cars off the road every year. Ali Zaidi, the White House national climate advisor, said the rule will slash almost 2 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, which the Biden administration has committed to halving by 2030. 

The rule will help “close that gap even further and mov[e] us along the trajectory we need to be on,” said Zaidi at a press conference at Expo City in Dubai, where world leaders and climate negotiators have gathered to eke out new climate agreements. “Even as we try to phase out our reliance on fossil fuels, we must work to clean up existing operations rapidly and rigorously, and today’s announcement does just that.”

The International Energy Agency estimates that more than two-thirds of the methane released from fossil fuel operations can be eliminated. The requirements in the new EPA regulation will help achieve those reductions. They’re also expected to have profound effects on public health. Nearly 18 million people live within a mile of an oil and gas field in the U.S., breathing in a host of toxic chemicals that are released along with methane. Proximity to oil and gas sites has been linked to a host of health effects, including lower lung function, high-risk pregnancies, and preterm birth.

“It’s especially important to recognize that a lot of that public health burden in the United States is falling on low-income communities and Black and brown communities,” said Rachel Cleetus, a policy director and lead economist with the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. “On both fronts — public health and climate — this is a win.” 

The Biden administration’s rule is one of several methane-related announcements at COP28. Separately, COP28 president Sultan Al-Jaber, who is also the head of the UAE’s national oil company, announced that 50 oil companies responsible for 40 percent of global oil production had signed onto a pledge to reduce emissions directly tied to their operations by 90 percent. The companies include ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, as well as the national oil companies of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Brazil, and about two dozen other countries. Al-Jaber has positioned himself as a dealmaker who can bring oil and gas companies to the table and convince them to make or strengthen climate pledges. “Methane is the low-hanging fruit,” said Al-Jaber at a summit announcing the pledges. “It is an easy and quick way.”

In concert, the International Energy Agency, the United Nations Environment Programme, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and a group of other nonprofit organizations launched a new effort to track oil and gas companies’ methane emissions. The Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit that has produced a body of research on methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, is planning to launch a $90 million satellite that will detect emissions from fossil fuel production sites around the world. Data from the satellite will be made available “to every human on the planet who has access to the Internet,” Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said on a press call.

“We need comprehensive, real-time awareness of specific sources of methane,” Krupp said. “Getting that information is indispensable for holding the oil and gas industry accountable for the pledges that they’ve made.”

Other environmental groups have dismissed such pledges as “a trojan horse for Big Oil and Gas greenwash” because none of the corporate commitments announced so far address the emissions that come from burning fossil fuels. Cleetus, the Union of Concerned Scientists economist, warned that corporate commitments are voluntary and inadequate. “This is an industry that has actively fought against climate action,” she said.

Companies have an economic incentive to cut methane emissions. The natural gas that doesn’t leak away can be used to power equipment on-site or sold on the market. In fact, the EPA expects an estimated $820 to $980 million worth of natural gas will be recovered each year as a result of its new rule. Jason Arceneaux, president of ARC Energy, a Louisiana-based company that works with oil and gas companies to reduce methane emissions, told Grist that operators are increasingly seizing those cost savings. They’re also responding to market signals, he said. 

“The ultimate belief of a lot of industry is that there’s going to be carbon footprint measurements,” said Arceneaux. “Some of the customers in Europe and others are wanting those measurements, and so I think customers are driving that decision.” 

This is the first year since the Paris Agreement was ratified in 2016 that countries are formally measuring their progress against the climate goals they agreed to — a process referred to as “global stocktake” in negotiation parlance. Most countries’ commitments only quantify carbon dioxide reductions, but negotiators are beginning to raise the need to include specific targets for methane and other greenhouse gases in national emission reduction pledges. 

The EPA’s methane rule is also being finalized as climate negotiators hash out whether all 198 countries party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change can agree to language on transitioning away from fossil fuels. Options include “phasing out” or “phasing down” fossil fuel use or the “substitution” of renewables for fossil fuels.

“We can’t at this moment when the climate crisis is spiraling out of control avoid addressing the root cause,” said Cleetus. “It’s not just emissions, but it’s the use of fossil fuels, and we can’t dodge that issue. That’s the crux of it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At COP28, a raft of initiatives to reduce methane include a long-awaited EPA rule on Dec 2, 2023.

This story was originally published by the Nevada Current.

A federal analysis released Tuesday confirmed Southern California’s Salton Sea contains enough lithium to meet the nation’s needs for decades.

Salton Sea has the potential to produce an estimated 375 million lithium batteries for electric vehicles — more than the total number of vehicles currently on U.S. roads, according to the analysis commissioned by the Department of Energy.

Those numbers dwarf the estimated lithium deposits available in Nevada’s Thacker Pass, long touted as the largest known source of lithium in the nation. 

The long-awaited analysis was conducted by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It’s the most comprehensive analysis to date quantifying the domestic lithium resources in California’s Salton Sea region. 

If the Salton Sea lithium can be extracted, it could give the U.S. the ability to produce domestically sourced lithium, ending the nation’s dependence on rival countries for a supply of the metal.

“Lithium is vital to decarbonizing the economy and meeting President Biden’s goals of 50 percent electric vehicle adoption by 2030,” said Jeff Marootian, DOE secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy. “This report confirms the once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a domestic lithium industry at home while also expanding clean, flexible electricity generation.” 

But that opportunity hinges on whether emerging technologies can make extracting lithium from brine cost-effective on a commercial scale. Over the last 12 months, the price of lithium has plummeted from roughly $85,000 per metric ton to less than $19,000, a plunge attributed to increased global production and unexpectedly soft demand. 

Generating electricity from the Salton Sea, a geothermal hot spot, requires extracting hot brine from underground aquifers to produce steam that drives turbines. Brine used for geothermal energy also happens to be rich in lithium that can theoretically be extracted in a more environmentally friendly closed system. 

The Salton Sea is believed to have the highest concentration of lithium, contained in geothermal brines, in the world.

Some researchers say integrating lithium extraction into geothermal operations can minimize the environmental impact of conventional lithium mining practices, like open-pit mining or evaporation ponds.

Three companies — Berkshire Hathaway Energy, EnergySource, and Controlled Thermal Resources — have been working for years on plans to extract lithium by taking advantage of the Salton Sea’s rich geothermal resources. 

Berkshire Hathaway Energy, the sprawling holding company with multiple subsidiaries, including NVEnergy, already operates 10 geothermal power generating plants on the southern shore of the Salton Sea, and recently commissioned a pilot facility to test the feasibility of extracting lithium from brine. 

Estimates for lithium in the Salton Sea were modeled using the average annual brine production from existing geothermal plants in the region and the concentration of lithium in the brine, according to the report. 

However, the DOE warns that those findings are based on existing companies’ ability to access the entire Salton Sea geothermal reservoir for electricity production, and their ability to fully extract lithium resources from geothermal brines. 

In recent years, the federal government has invested in brine lithium extraction, providing $11 million in DOE funding to develop and accelerate technologies for extracting and converting battery-grade lithium from geothermal brines.

The state of California is also leaning into the development of lithium extraction in the Salton Sea.

In 2020, the California State Legislature established a commission to investigate and analyze lithium extraction in California, including recommendations to expand lithium extraction from geothermal brines in the region. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has referred to the Salton Sea as “the Saudi Arabia of lithium production,” and the state last year established a lithium extraction tax of up to $800 a ton.

Residents of Niland, California — the closest community to a geothermal plant — said they believed a combined lithium extraction and geothermal energy production facility would have a  positive impact on the local community, with slightly higher scores for geothermal compared to lithium extraction, according to a survey conducted by the DOE. However, surrounding communities in additional surveys did express concern about environmental impacts and air quality.

Lithium extraction in the Salton Sea may represent a rare consensus among conservationists, local populations, and industry, as mining projects face substantial community concern and backlash in Nevada and other parts of the country. 

In Nevada, several Native American tribes have filed lawsuits against the proposed Thacker Pass mine, arguing the mine would desecrate a sacred site and violate federal preservation law and land policy. 

Conservation groups have also fiercely opposed a planned lithium mine at Rhyolite Ridge in Esmeralda County, overlapping the only known population of the Tiehm’s buckwheat plant, a rare wildflower listed as endangered by the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service last year.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Salton Sea could meet nation’s lithium demand for decades, study finds on Dec 2, 2023.

This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

The announcement earlier this week — that the EPA wants to get rid of lead pipes that provide drinking water within the next decade — sounded like good news, especially in Chicago, which has the most lead water pipes of any city in the United States.

But the fine print is disappointing: Because of a loophole or “carve-out” in the proposed rule, some residents there could still end up waiting another 40 years for the lead pipes to be removed. 

The EPA mandate makes an exception for places where it would be almost impossible to replace all of the lead pipes within 10 years. It would be a colossal challenge to remove Chicago’s nearly 400,000 lead water pipes. Cities and towns that are in a similar position to Chicago could instead replace 10,000 pipes a year until all lead pipes are removed. That means Chicago could theoretically take more than 40 years to solve the problem and still be in compliance with the rule, which is expected to be finalized next year.

Lead can cause a host of health issues, including damage to the brain and nervous system. In children, lead can severely disrupt their development and lead to issues with hearing or speech as well as learning or behavioral issues.

The new rule would also lower the limit of lead from 15 to 10 parts per billion, or ppb. The World Health Organization has said that there is no safe level of exposure to lead. 

For drinking water in particular, the long-term consumption of lead is a problem, said Adrienne L. Katner, director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Program at Louisiana State University in New Orleans. 

“The one big difference is that you’re ingesting water on a daily basis and it’s a chronic exposure. So even if it’s low dose, it is a concern,” said Katner. 

In Chicago, the problem is so acute that a Guardian analysis of city data found that 1 in 20 taps have water that exceeds the current EPA minimum of 15 parts per billion. The analysis also found that lead levels are higher in the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods. 

While Gina Ramirez, Midwest outreach manager at the National Resources Defense Council, was delighted to hear the announcement of the rules, she’s also concerned that they don’t go far enough. 

“That 10 year rule is not going to apply to Chicago, which as an [environmental justice] advocate, as a parent, as an expectant mother, is really concerning to me,” said Ramirez. “I would love to see lead service line replacement within my children’s generation. And if we’re going by a [longer] timeline, that’s not acceptable.” 

Previous attempts to solve the problem from the city have so far been unsuccessful. A Chicago Sun-Times investigation found that despite former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s promise to make significant inroads on the issue, there were only 280 pipes that were replaced by the end of her tenure. 

Ramirez is also personally invested in the fight against lead in drinking water. She helped her mother apply for a city program that helps residents replace those same lead service lines at no cost, but the onerous paperwork and long wait times left her wanting. 

“My mom, you know, part of the process of getting her line removed was to test her water, she still has not gotten the results,” said Ramirez. “She did have her lead service line replaced, but she still doesn’t know if she had 15 parts per million or even higher in her water previously.” 

Those concerns are not unfounded, since Ramirez’s mother lives on the city’s Southeast side, a place that has historically been polluted by multiple heavy industrial plants that operate in the area and where a higher percentage of lead in drinking water was found.

Lead can take 20 years to fully dissipate from someone’s body, which means it can cause health issues decades after exposure, from the cardiovascular system to pregnancy, according to Katner in New Orleans. 

“Chicagoans have given the ultimate sacrifice, which is our health,” added Ramirez. 

The city’s plan to tackle the issue is one of several environmental justice problems facing current Mayor Brandon Johnson, who campaigned on the issue.

It would be a monumental task for the city, which only stopped installing lead pipes in 1986, after the federal government outlawed it. Megan Vidis at the Department of Water Management in Chicago noted that if the city was held to the 10 year rule, it would have to replace 40,000 service lines a year. This would be a massive leap from the current 8,000 lead pipes it replaces each year.

“There are not enough plumbers in Illinois, much less the Midwest to do that,” said Vidis. 

Additionally, the price tag for replacing lead service lines in Chicago is an estimated $12 billion. The total amount of money offered by the Biden Administration to replace every service line in the country is $15 billion. 

As residents are waiting for the city to ramp up its efforts, Katner urges people to buy pitcher filters or filters mounted to their taps in the kitchen. The low-cost solution is much more affordable than the billions needed to replace lead water lines and can start protecting residents’ health today. 

“I think that the rule is a good move in the right direction,” said Katner. “Is it perfect? No, but you know, it’s a good move in the right direction.”

Editor’s note: The NRDC is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers play no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA is aiming to get rid of lead pipes in 10 years. But not in Chicago. on Dec 1, 2023.

Hadeel Ikhmais left her home in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem at 5 a.m. on Tuesday to catch her 5 p.m. flight to Dubai. Ikhmais is the head of the climate change office at the Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority, or EQA, and for months she and her colleagues had been planning to attend COP28, the annual United Nations climate conference taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, this year. Encouraged by the fact that an Arab nation was hosting the conference for the second year in a row, the Palestinian government had paid the United Nations tens of thousands of dollars to secure a pavilion for the first time ever. Pavilions serve as spaces for press conferences, delegate meetings, and venues to showcase a country’s climate priorities to COP attendees. Palestinian delegates spent months designing visuals for the pavilion, securing funds for travel, and preparing materials for the conference. Nearly 50 delegates planned to attend. 

Then, on October 7, Hamas launched an assault on towns and villages in southern Israel, and the Israeli military responded with a bloody bombing campaign across Gaza.

Overnight, traveling to Dubai became more dangerous. Bethlehem is located in the West Bank, an area of Palestine that has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. The region does not have an airport, and Ikhmais would have to make the trek to the Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan, about 60 miles away. The journey to Jordan had always been exhausting, but after October 7, the Israeli checkpoints that dotted the road to the border became treacherous. Lines were long, travelers were forced to wait for hours, Israeli soldiers conducted intrusive physical searches, and rumors were swirling that the Israeli government might close the checkpoints. Being out in the streets at all was frightening; In recent weeks, the Israeli military has killed civilians in raids on the occupied West Bank. 

“I was scared to leave my house because to go to another city during these situations, it’s not an easy thing,” said Ikhmais. “You are going to travel somewhere that you don’t know what is going on.” 

Ultimately, Ikhmais passed through the Jericho checkpoint and successfully made her flight to Dubai. In total, fewer than 10 Palestinian delegates made it to Dubai, each facing long and challenging journeys. Her colleague Ahmed Abuthaher, for instance, had a similar experience the previous day coming from Ramallah. 

But both Ikhmais and Abuthaher said that despite the daunting travel challenges, it was important to have Palestinian representation at COP28. Gaza is experiencing the impacts of sea-level rise on its Mediterranean coast, and Palestinian farmers are contending with flooding, drought, and drastic fluctuations in temperatures. Additionally, Palestine’s recognition as a member under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, and its subsequent participation in COPs is an assertion of its statehood.

“Even with the difficulties that we face on the ground — the war in Gaza or the Israeli aggression in the West Bank — we are part of the world,” said Abuthaher, who is a director general at the EQA and Palestine’s lead contact on climate change with the United Nations. “And even though our emissions are very, very limited, we are part of this fight. We have to do our part to help others combat climate change.”

That Palestine is even a member of the UNFCCC is the result of a long and hard-fought battle. The government was interested in signing onto the treaty in the late 2000s, but its experience with a different arm of the U.N. held back its admission. It hit a roadblock in 2011 when UNESCO, the U.N. agency that aims to further international peace and security through the promotion of education and culture, voted overwhelmingly to admit Palestine as a full member. In response, the United States withdrew a huge sum of funding from UNESCO, citing a 1994 law that bars Congress from providing capital to any U.N. body that “grants full membership as a state to any organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood.”

After the U.S.’s decision, “We were very reluctant to join any international platform,” so as “not to cause any harm to developing countries who were looking for that kind of financial support,” said Nedal Katbeh-Bader, who worked as a minister at the EQA from 1999 until his retirement earlier this year. 

Nonetheless, the agency recognized the importance of joining the UNFCCC. Entering the treaty would afford Palestine equal recognition among the world’s countries and, Katbeh-Bader emphasized, unlock funding opportunities for climate adaptation efforts that the EQA was struggling to get off the ground. In addition to the restrictions imposed by the Israeli occupation, Palestine’s attempts to thwart climate change have been stymied by its location in the Eastern Mediterranean, where temperatures are rising at almost twice the rate of the global average. With the UNESCO fiasco a fresh memory, environment officials in Palestine began meeting with other governments to build a case for admission to the UNFCCC. They won the support of Arab states and, in the lead-up to COP21 in Paris, the French government. 

Shortly after the Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015, establishing the goal of keeping the global average temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, Palestine was admitted to the UNFCCC. “The French presidency helped us a lot,” recalled Abuthaher. “After the finalization of the COP, we submitted our application, and there was no objection.”

Palestine was the first U.N. member from the Arab world to sign the agreement, and among the first 15 globally. When its membership was announced in early 2016, a State Department official said that the decision would not impact the U.S.’s participation in the UNFCCC. But upon joining, Palestinian officials immediately ran into challenges trying to secure funding. 

Developing nations often rely on global institutions funded by wealthy nations to finance climate projects. One of the main climate funds is the Global Environment Facility, an intergovernmental body headquartered in Washington, D.C. The U.S. is its biggest shareholder. In the summer of 2016, EQA Chair Adalah Atteerah contacted the Global Environment Facility’s then-CEO, Naoko Ishii, to request funding, but months passed with no response. Repeated attempts to reach the organization over the following year were ignored. (The Global Environment Facility declined to comment in time for publication, citing time constraints.)

“We have two challenges facing us to be able to implement these climate action plans: the Israeli Occupation and the lack of financial resources,” wrote Atteerah in a letter to world leaders before COP24 in Poland in 2018. Palestine had signed onto the UNFCCC in “good faith,” she said, but the funding it needed to fulfill its duties to the convention was being withheld by “some entities.”  

All UNFCCC members are required to develop a document called a Nationally Determined Contribution, or NDC, which outlines their annual greenhouse gas emissions and their plans to reduce them. 

Palestine submitted its first NDC to the UNFCCC in 2017 and an updated version in October 2021. The document cites adaptation to climate change as its main goal, since Palestine contributes minimally to global greenhouse gas emissions. Both that report and Palestine’s National Adaptation Plan, which it submitted to the U.N. in 2016, name numerous challenges stemming from the Israeli government’s strict control over Palestinian land and natural resources. One of the focuses of both documents is the agricultural sector, which the vast majority of Palestinians rely on for their livelihoods. Rain-fed agriculture accounts for more than 80 percent of farming in Palestine, and increasingly frequent dry spells and soil evaporation from high temperatures are degrading the quality of the harvest. The National Adaptation Plan notes that the Israeli occupation has limited Palestinians’ ability to develop wastewater treatment plants, which could provide an alternative form of irrigation to save desiccated crops. 

Another focus of the reports is the electricity sector, which currently only fulfills 2 percent of domestic demand, according to the EQA. The Israeli government effectively controls the lights in Palestine, with the majority of Palestinians’ electricity coming from the Israel Electric Corporation. As a result, electricity outages are common, particularly in times of heightened tension and violence such as the Israeli military’s ongoing campaign in Gaza. Before the war, approximately 25 percent of Gaza’s power came from rooftop solar, significantly more than in Israel. The NDC outlines multiple goals, such as the expansion of solar power and the establishment of a national high-voltage grid, but the authors cited complications to these ambitions, too. Israel has historically rejected most of Palestinians’ permit applications for solar development.

Abuthaher said that the EQA submitted a permit request about five years ago to the Israeli government for just 500 square meters of space — about a tenth of a football field — near Jericho to erect solar panels to power a few households. But the land was in Area C, a region in the West Bank administered by Israel, and the EQA was denied permission. “In Area C, we face huge difficulties,” Abuthaher said. “We need their permits.”

In some instances, Israel has also bombed solar panels. In 2018, Palestine received funding from the World Bank to build a 7-megawatt rooftop solar project in Gaza. But the $11.2 million project, celebrated as one of “Gaza Strip’s brightest beacons of promise,” was bombed by the Israel Defense Forces in May 2021. The airstrikes damaged 5,000 of the 21,000 solar panels and caused an estimated $5 million in damage.  

Ikhmais and Abuthaher said that in the past, there was an informal understanding that the Israeli government wouldn’t target projects built with foreign funding. “It was a trust that Israel would not harm any project with donor funding,” said Abuthaher. “But that is not the case on the ground.”

The Green Climate Fund, which was established under the UNFCCC to help developing countries finance climate projects, has greenlit several projects in Palestine, including a water banking project in Gaza, a national platform for its climate initiatives, and making water infrastructure more climate resilient. Some of these projects — like the water banking project — were operational before the recent conflict, but Abuthaher said he doesn’t know whether they’ve been bombed in the last couple of months.

“Everything that helps to protect the environment is damaged and destroyed,” Katbeh-Bader said. “Whatever you can imagine in your worst dreams, you will find it in Gaza.” 

When the current crisis ends, Ikhmais said the EQA will need to conduct a wide-ranging and detailed assessment of the damage. “We are just waiting for these horrible things to end,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Despite war at home, Palestine arrives at global climate conference on Dec 1, 2023.