Lead Mining Stewardship - Grey Lead and the Role of
The LEAD Group
Elizabeth O’Brien, Partner of the United Nations Environment Program
(UNEP)
Partnership for Cleaner Fuels and Vehicles (PCFV), and President, The
LEAD Group Incorporated; Ian Smith, Analyst; and Anne Roberts,
Journalist. Edited by Rachelle Sullivan, Intern.
Fact
Sheet created 11 August 2006
Environmental health NGOs provide independent
critique of the adverse impacts of the increasing volume of lead mined
each year. The claims that “lead is the most recycled material used
today” and about
97% of the lead-acid batteries currently in use will be recycled to
make new batteries”
are unsupported by evidence and further rendered hollow when little or
no resources are allocated to Product Stewardship, which is a
product-centred approach to environmental protection. It calls on
those in the product lifecycle – miners, smelters, manufacturers,
retailers, users, recyclers and disposers – to share responsibility
for reducing the environmental impacts of products
NGOs are independent entities with well developed
systems and campaigns to implement and monitor social change. The LEAD
Group, founded in Australia in 1991 by parents of lead poisoned
children, has in the last 15 years developed advocacy systems
involving regulators, industry and the wider community aimed at lead
abatement, specifically, the elimination of lead poisoning (globally)
by 2012 and protection of the environment from lead. The LEAD Group
provides staff for the unique-in-the-world, free-to-users Global Lead
Advice and Support Service (GLASS).
GLASS
provides information, advice and referrals in relation to
the management and prevention of lead poisoning and lead
contamination. GLASS can
refer callers to community or other groups, specialist tradespeople,
organisations, etc, as appropriate. GLASS also provides information through The LEAD Group website
and maintains a database including a library database.
GLASS
currently runs nine egroups ranging in lead related topics and with
the largest currently being an egroup for parents of lead poisoned
kids with autism with over 280 members. GLASS has written and web
published over 30 different fact sheets covering topics ranging from
state/territory income from mining royalties for lead to lead in
breast milk. GLASS has distributed over 680,000 library items in 16
languages since 1995. The GLASS database has over 4700 listed experts
for referrals in medical, environmental and other lead related fields.
GLASS
is funded through corporate sponsorship, government grants and private
donations. Currently our only funding is under two grants from the
Department of Environment and Heritage, one for administrative costs
for $25000 lasting from 1/12/05 until 30/11/06 and one for a manager
and administrator wage of $28000 and $24000 respectively for the
financial year 2006-07.
Due
to funding constraints GLASS extensively utilises volunteers for its
day to day operations. GLASS currently has 23 active volunteers who do
everything from keeping up to date with the data entry of calls, doing
research to answer complicated enquiries, keeping our website and
library up to date, accounting, systems administration and special
projects. GLASS also takes on university interns to do short term
projects, one of which is currently a UTS Student doing a project on
product stewardship of Australian lead.
GLASS provides lead poisoning / lead contamination
prevention and management advice directly and has received such
information in its capacity as a clearinghouse in over 48,500
individual calls (phone or email) with people from over 80 countries .
The organisation also provides web-published information at www.lead.org.au
, which is one of the most accessed lead information websites on the
Internet, having over one and two thirds of a million visitors from 227
countries and Territories .
The only global estimate of the number of people who are lead poisoned
is the quite conservative World Health Organisation (WHO) estimate
that in the year 2000, there were 120 million lead poisoned people
. With less than 1% of people who are lead poisoned accessing
information through GLASS, the majority of the 120 million people
clearly do not have reliable access to information regarding lead
poisoning, especially, how to prevent it.
The LEAD Group works on the definition of “lead
poisoned” as: having a blood lead level which exceeds the World
Health Organisation’s goal to be less than 10 micrograms per
decilitre (10 µg/dL). This is based on the US Centers for Disease
Control 1991 statement that having a blood lead level below 10 µg/dL
is defined as “not lead poisoned.”
Through the data collected in GLASS’s operation,
The LEAD Group provides long term focus on lead issues through data
capture and analysis. This system can monitor the effectiveness of
change initiatives over time, for instance, to ensure the legitimacy
and success of the “greening” of lead production and recycling.
The LEAD Group is concerned that despite the
excellent policies of the Green Leadtm
initiative, in exporting more lead than any other
country, Australia’s moral obligation to also “export” the lead
management knowledge and counselling services is not being met,
particularly in relation to “grey lead”. The LEAD Group believes
that information and counselling currently provided is inadequate
compared to the volume of lead produced, and the documented toll in
real human terms it extracts.
What is “grey lead”?
“Grey lead” is a newly-created term defined
here as all lead distributed prior to or outside of any current
orchestrated approach to its management. It consists of lead already
in the environment from some thousands of years of failing to know of
lead’s capacity to poison, and including lead exported to
under-regulated and under-informed countries ignorant of the fact that
lead is pervasively used in products, and so outside the scope of
control of any current Australian initiatives.
Specific examples of “Grey lead” include:
- the
majority of lead acid batteries (LABs) that are handled by
companies that are NOT part of the Green Leadtm
Consortium;
- the
25% of LABs that are NOT recycled ;
- the nearly 30% of lead
metal that is NOT used to make LABs
but is made into less-sustainable products with far lower
recycling rates or for which recycling is dangerous due to the
presence of other toxics eg solder. According to the Conference of the Parties to
the Basel Convention, “Lead can be reclaimed from solder
wastes, but recycling lead/tin solders can be extremely dangerous
because emissions of dioxins, beryllium, arsenic, isocyanates and
lead itself are likely.”
Australian
Lead – “Green” or “grey”?
The
Australian mining industry is aiming to be sustainable and minimise
harm to humans and the environment. Mining, by definition, cannot
be “sustainable”. It can, however, minimise its impact on the
environment and human health. The Green Leadä
initiative aims to do this. However, the “Green” of the Green Leadä
initiative does not transfer to grey lead - the lead already in the
environment (e.g. in paint and petrol) and lead or lead products that
are lost from the Green Leadä
“cycle”. In other words, “greenness” is not inherent in the
lead but in the process of its life-cycle management, and “green”
lead quickly fades to grey if the lead escapes from the managed loop.
All the lead produced prior to Cannington lead mine taking on its
Green Leadä
credentials for example, is grey. Grey lead has done and will continue
to do damage unless the effort is made to manage and control the full
production cycle and recycling, including pre-existing products and
contamination.
The
majority of calls to GLASS relate to lead poisoning and lead
contamination risks of grey lead: in house paint and other surface
coatings, ceiling dust in building cavities (containing the lead from
petrol and industrial pollution), in batteries, ammunition,
electronics, rolled and extruded products, lead lighting, plastics,
rubber, etc, that is, the hazards from historical uses of lead, due to
the failure to understand the consequences of past and continuing lead
production. Until a dedicated government and industry sponsored
initiative aims to eradicate these issues arising from the past, and
continuing to arise from present mining activity, Australia’s lead
producing industry will not be perceived, and cannot state with
integrity, that it is “green” nor sustainable.
If, as most people imagine, there is no more leaded
petrol and leaded residential paint in the world and lead mining is a
“sustainable development”, then you would expect that there would
be no lead poisoned people in the world. One way in which this idea
can become a reality is by way of preventing lead from mining
companies from being sold to the one manufacturer who uses lead to
make the leaded petrol additive, that is, Innospec in the UK. If
Innospec could not buy lead, hundreds of millions of children in the
81 countries still selling leaded petrol
would not have to wait until 2010 for the SAICM (Strategic Approach to
International Chemicals Management) goal of a global lead petrol ban
to be achieved .
Lead mining will be able to legitimately and
credibly claim to be sustainable, when the only uses of lead are
recyclable, non -dispersive and no lead contamination is caused during
the product life cycle, so eliminating lead poisoning.
The assumption that there is necessarily a large economic cost to implementing a sound
environmental recycling policy has been disproved with many examples
of successful changes with a cost neutral and even cost benefit. The
LEAD Group looks forward to support from government and industry in
supporting a sustainable lead production industry, by providing a
global information service including data collection and analysis
service that monitors the effectiveness of the Green Leadtm
Initiative and supports Australia’s claim of having the most
sustainable mining industry.
What is needed to turn grey
lead “green”?
- All Australian lead mining companies (ie Consolidated Broken
Hill (CBH), Magellan Metals and Kagara Zinc Ltd) would place a
priority on reducing the size of their ecological footprint, generally
defined as a designated area affected or covered by a device or
phenomenon, as Zinifex, Xstrata, BHP Billiton and Perilya have already
done.
The footprint would be regarded as including Stewardship issues, that
is, well beyond the mine gate.
- All Australian lead mines would comply with Green Leadä Consortium principles, as
per BHP Billiton’s
Cannington lead mine in Queensland.
- All Australian lead mining, smelting, manufacturing and
recycling companies would change their practice and improve their
performance in order to comply with the Green Leadä
Consortium’s assessment tool (once it is completed) and achieve a 100% recycling rate for lead acid
batteries
- As for uranium production, Australian lead mining companies
would join with other lead mining companies and international agencies
in a global effort to stop lead being sold to the one manufacturer, UK
company Innospec Inc, who will use it to make leaded petrol additive.
- Global effort would stop lead being knowingly sold to
manufacturers who will use it to make leaded cosmetics, products that
put lead into food (leaded candy, lead soldered cans, leaded curry
powder etc), Ayurvedic medicine (in which lead is added to increase
the weight), folk medicines (based on false claims of lead’s health
benefits), leaded toys, jewellery, residential paints (and eventually
all inks and surface coatings) and PVC (and eventually all foams and
plastics), lead wheel weights, lead fishing sinkers and tackle, lead
solder for plumbing and electronics, etc, that is, all dispersive uses
of lead for which replacements are available.
- Australian lead mining, smelting, manufacturing and recycling
companies would support any efforts by governments and organisations
of governments to stop the manufacture of dispersive uses of lead for
which replacements are available and would report such activities in
Stewardship reporting, including sales of lead or lead products or leaded waste that were prevented due to the company’s policy of preventing
leakage of lead from the controlled or formal lead acid battery cycle.
An example of such activity would be a drive by lead acid battery
recyclers to increase collection of used batteries within Australia to
100% of the estimated 95,000 tonnes of used lead acid batteries that
arise per year, by perhaps paying more for each battery returned and
supporting a Stewardship levy on new batteries sold, to cover
collection costs. An estimated 20,000 tonnes per annum (21% of used
batteries that arise in Australia) are either still in dumped vehicles
or dumped as batteries or buried or "recycled" in whole car
body recycling and dumped as flock overseas or illegally exported as
batteries shipped to Asia in contravention of the Basel Convention.
- Australian lead smelting companies would make lead for lead
acid batteries that can be recycled into new lead acid batteries ad
infinitum, without the addition of newly mined lead. According to Dr
Peter Hurley of Blake International Limited, an OH&S consultancy
in the UK, battery makers can only use two thirds (65%) of the lead
recovered from used lead acid batteries. “Even in the US, much of the recovered lead is exported. The
reason this is so is because they use lead-antimony alloy, but cannot
use that alloy in the anode plate of the battery as its too corrosive
in that application. If they used lead-tin alloys then they could
reuse nearly all the material they recovered/recycled, provided they
could keep it separate from the lead-antimony.” .
- Australian lead smelting companies would include in their
Stewardship reports for both primary and secondary smelters, the
annual tonnage of leaded wastes recycled for their lead and other
heavy metal content eg ceiling dust and other building cavity dusts
and used/removed paint debris, as well as secondary lead smelters
reporting a breakdown by percentage as to the source of their feed eg
lead acid batteries, lead flashing and other building scrap etc. The
report should note continuous reduction of the need for addition of
newly mined lead into the battery recycling lead stream.
- Australian lead mining companies would commission GLASS to
report on the latest news on lead received at the GLASS information service and clearinghouse. Reports would include impacts of the
estimated 300 million metric tons out there in the world
of grey lead in all its forms, in terms of potential for high blood
lead levels / lead contamination levels as well as numbers of people /
products / area of land or volume of air or water affected and these
reports would form part of the annual assessment of the size of the
company’s environmental footprint in their Environmental Reports.
Recent examples would include a US child’s death from ingestion of a
lead charm on a bracelet provided free with a pair of shoes made by
Reebok International Ltd and consequent recall of 300,000 heart-shaped
charm bracelets in the US which followed the world’s largest recall
of 150 million pieces of leaded jewellery in the US in 2004 ,
and the need for similar recalls in other countries. With lead being
the most researched toxicant
in the world, it is also critical that the lead industry keeps up to
date on the latest findings eg research indicating that even low blood
lead levels, between 5-9 µg/dL, carry an increased risk of death from
all causes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, and that “data from
1999-2002, suggests an elevated risk of peripheral arterial disease,
hypertension, and renal dysfunction in a population with blood lead
levels averaging approximately 2 µg/dL.” [Source: Alliance for
Healthy Homes, Alliance Alert, August 2008] Previous research that found an
increased risk of early death associated with a blood lead level above
20 µg/dL was estimated to shorten the lives of 30 million Americans .
- The lead industry would ensure lead mining earnings fund lead
mining Stewardship work with governments, NGOs and GLASS to develop
public health policies to firstly review recent research on lead
exposures and lead’s health effects and find out the extent of lead
poisoning across all ages and risk factors in every country where
Australian lead has gone and then set a blood lead goal (Australia
rescinded it’s 1993 goal that all Australians have a blood lead
level less than 10 µg/dL, on 31 Dec 2005) and targets, and act to
reduce blood lead levels including through education programs and
information & counselling service provision. With corporate
sponsorship in addition to government funding, GLASS staff would not
need to be mainly transient volunteers but employees who could run
long-term outreach projects such as pro-active media campaigns and
web-publishing English and non-English lead management information and
remote communication (improvements to web information , E-groups ,
forums, etc) and building up the lists of overseas experts on lead.
Since Australian lead mining Stewardship is a marketable concept on
the world stage, this expenditure on finding out where Australian lead
goes and its impacts, and reducing them, should be seen as a vital
step towards halving resource use and potentially doubling wealth.
References
Source: Sacramento
Electric Vehicle Association US “The Truth About Lead Acid Batteries”
1995 http://saccityweb.com/seva/evupdate/1995/evup0695.html#leadtrue
Source: GLASS Database 11/8/06
Source: David Ratcliffe, LEAD Group Webmaster 11/8/06
Source: L Fewtrell, R Kaufman, A Pruss-Ustun, “Lead: Assessing
the environmental burden of disease at national and local levels”
2003 http://www.who.int/quantifying_ehimpacts/publications/9241546107/en/index.html
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) “Preventing Lead Poisoning In
Young Children” 1991 http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/Publications/books/plpyc/contents.htm
Source: Dr Peter Hurley, Blake International, UK 2005 https://lead.org.au/bblp/Green_lead/sld018.htm
Based on the statement:
“Lead-acid batteries for automotive, industrial and consumer purposes
account for over 70% of the world’s demand for lead.” Source:
Minerals and Metals Sector, Natural Resources Canada, 2004 http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/ms/cmy/content/2004/33.PDF
Conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention on the Control
of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes, United Nations
Environment Program (UNEP) 25-29 Oct 2004 http://archive.basel.int/meetings/cop/cop7/docs/08a3e.pdf
Sources: International Fuel Quality Center
(IFQC) and Partnership for Cleaner Fuels and Vehicles (PCFV) et al, 20
Oct 2005, cited in https://lead.org.au/fs/fst27superseded.html [Also
see the up-to-date
Countries where Leaded Petrol is Possibly Still Sold for Road Use
[List of six countries in region, alphabetical and
population order]
As at 17th June 2011. Total Population Directly
Affected: 194,770,689, at https://lead.org.au/fs/fst27.html ]
Source: Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management:
Global Plan of Action page 33 of 84, 6 June 2006 http://www.chem.unep.ch/saicm/SAICM%20texts/standalone_txt.PDF
Sources: Google searches for <footprint> on www.cbhresources.com.au;
www.ivernia.com; www.kagara.com.au;
www.perilya.com.au; www.bhpbilliton.com;
www.glencorexstrata.com/; and
www.zinifex.com
Source: The LEAD Group
Inc, 19 Jul 2005 https://lead.org.au/submission_to_nsw_dipnr.html
Source: Elizabeth O'Brien, Cornelia Dost and Bei Qu, 1 Nov 2005 https://lead.org.au/bblp/Green_lead/GreenLeadConference%20Paper.doc
Source: National Research Council, “Measuring Lead Exposure in
Infants, Children and Other Sensitive Populations”,
Washington 1993 http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=030904927X
Source: CDC, 23 Mar 2006.
Death of a Child After Ingestion of
a Metallic Charm --- Minnesota, 2006 http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm55d323a1.htm
Toxicant refers to toxic
substances that are produced by or are a by-product of
anthropogenic (human-made) activities. Source: Klaassen, CD (2001)
‘Casarett and Doull’s Toxicology: The Basic Science of Poisons’,
6th Edition, p.13, published by McGraw Hill, United
States. Toxic substances are defined as one with the inherent
ability to cause systemic damage to a living organism – another
word for it being poison. Source: NOVA: Science in the News, ‘The
bitter-sweet taste of toxic substances’, February 1999 http://www.science.org.au/nova/036/036key.htm
Source: Chicago Tribune, “Study links early adult deaths to lead
- 30 million in U.S. could be at risk”, 27
Dec 2002 http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-119937589.html;
http://inchesnetwork.net/updates_jan03_36.htm
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