Partnership for Battery Action (Pb Action)
Lead poisoning is the most neglected and pervasive barrier to children’s health and development. 800 million children globally have been exposed to toxic levels of lead; 1 in 3 children in low and middle income countries have been lead poisoned. Lead poisoning results in over 5 million deaths and $1.4 trillion in lost productivity globally every year.
Unsafe recycling of used lead-acid batteries (ULABs) – such as automotive or industrial batteries – is a leading, addressable contributor to lead poisoning. Recent research suggests it contributes about ⅓ of the global lead poisoning burden.
Despite a comparable estimated health burden to tuberculosis and malaria, lead poisoning receives only a fraction of the attention and global philanthropic support.
This challenge is solvable: many countries have successfully eliminated lead exposure from ULAB recycling. This is an economics problem, not a technical one. In low-and-middle income countries (LMICs), safe recycling is not yet financially sustainable due to i) lack of standards, knowledge, and resources to support recycling facilities, ii) lack of transparency and accountability for lead buyers to purchase from safe recyclers, and iii) insufficient policies and enforcement from governments around the world to require safer recycling.
GDI’s role
Pb Action’s strategy is to consolidate ULAB recycling into fewer, safer recycling facilities by piloting and scaling market-shaping efforts that incentivize lead suppliers and buyers to make recycling safer. Our goal is to eliminate over 80% of the world’s unsafe ULAB recycling by 2040.
Pb Action works with non-governmental organizations, government, and industry partners to make lead-acid battery supply chains more transparent and responsible. We aim to ensure that safer-standard recycling is the most profitable and efficient choice for every player in the market, including in low-resource settings.
We do this by:
- Filling knowledge gaps with actionable applied research: A primary obstacle to addressing unsafe ULAB recycling is the prevalence of essential knowledge gaps, limiting NGO and government action. Together with leading researchers and implementers, we are launching an “Investigate Agenda” to actively address these open questions through applied research.
- Piloting innovative solutions: In partnership with other stakeholders, we are pioneering innovative pilots, like our “Recycler Mapping” initiative that develops a standard assessment methodology for recyclers in low resource settings. The results of this effort will be to identify which high-potential recyclers would benefit from investment and technical support, to increase supply chain transparency and accountability for industry and to support governments to adopt effective policies to regulate recycling.
- Partnering with local leaders to scale solutions: We plan to work with local leaders who want to develop holistic national and regional strategies to combat unsafe recycling, including identifying optimized policies and market-shaping efforts that will result in the consolidation of recycling to fewer, safer facilities.
We work in partnership with other non-governmental organizations, researchers, governments, and industry and believe that the elimination of one of the largest sources of lead poisoning will only be achieved by cross-sector collaboration.
