Dhaka Bangladesh. Credit score: Unsplash/CC0 Public Area
Bangladeshi Junayed Akter is 12 years outdated however the poisonous lead coursing by his veins has left him with the diminutive stature of somebody a number of years youthful.
Akter is certainly one of 35 million youngsters—round 60% of all youngsters within the South Asian nation—who’ve dangerously excessive ranges of lead publicity.
The causes are assorted, however his mom blames his maladies on a since-shuttered manufacturing facility that rapidly scrapped and recycled outdated car batteries for revenue, within the course of poisoning the air and the earth of his small village.
“It would start at night, and the whole area would be filled with smoke. You could smell this particular odor when you breathed,” Bithi Akter instructed AFP.
“The fruit no longer grew during the season. One day, we even found two dead cows at my aunt’s house.”
Medical checks confirmed Junayed’s blood had twice the extent of lead deemed by the World Well being Group to trigger severe, and sure irreversible, psychological impairment in younger youngsters.
“From the second grade onward, he didn’t want to listen to us anymore, he didn’t want to go to school,” Bithi mentioned, as her son sat subsequent to her whereas gazing blankly out on the courtyard of their dwelling.
“He cried all the time too.”
Lead poisoning just isn’t a brand new phenomenon in Bangladesh, and the causes are manifold.
They embody the heavy metallic’s widespread and continued use in paint, in defiance of a authorities ban, and its use as an adulterant in turmeric spice powder to enhance its colour and perceived high quality.
An amazing many instances are blamed on casual battery recycling factories which have proliferated across the nation in response to rising demand.
Kids uncovered to harmful ranges of lead danger decreased intelligence and cognitive efficiency, anemia, stunted development and lifelong neurological problems.
The manufacturing facility within the Akter household’s village closed after sustained complaints from the group.
However environmental watchdog Pure Earth believes there might be 265 such websites elsewhere within the nation.
“They break down old batteries, remove the lead and melt it down to make new ones,” Pure Earth’s Mitali Das instructed AFP.
“They do all this in the open air,” she added. “The toxic fumes and acidic water produced during the operation pollute the air, soil and water.”
‘They’ve killed our village’
In Fulbaria, a village that sits a number of hours’ drive north of the capital Dhaka, operations at one other battery recycling manufacturing facility owned by a Chinese language firm are in full swing.
On one facet are verdant paddy fields. On the opposite, a pipe spews murky water right into a brackish pool bordered by lifeless lands, caked with thick orange mud.
“As a child, I used to bring food to my father when he was in the fields. The landscape was magnificent, green, the water was clear,” engineer and native resident Rakib Hasan, 34, instructed AFP.
“You see what it looks like now. It’s dead, forever,” he added. “They’ve killed our village.”
Hasan complained in regards to the manufacturing facility’s air pollution, prompting a decide to declare it unlawful and order the ability be shut off—a call later reversed by the nation’s supreme court docket.
“The factory bought off the local authorities,” Hasan mentioned. “Our country is poor, many people are corrupt.”
Neither the corporate nor the Chinese language embassy in Dhaka responded to AFP’s requests for touch upon the manufacturing facility’s operations.
Syeda Rizwana Hasan, who helms Bangladesh’s setting ministry, declined to touch upon the case as a result of it was nonetheless earlier than the courts.
“We regularly conduct operations against the illegal production and recycling of electric batteries,” she mentioned.
“But these efforts are often insufficient given the scale of the phenomenon.”
‘Unaware of the risks’
Casual battery recycling is a booming enterprise in Bangladesh.
It’s pushed largely by the mass electrification of rickshaws—a previously pedal-powered technique of conveyance widespread in each large cities and rural cities.
Greater than 4 million rickshaws are discovered on Bangladeshi roads and authorities estimate the marketplace for becoming all of them with electrical motors and batteries at round $870 million.
“It’s the downside of going all-electric,” mentioned Maya Vandenant of the UN youngsters’s company, which is pushing a technique to scrub up the business with tighter rules and tax incentives.
“Most people are unaware of the dangers,” she mentioned, including that the general public well being impacts are forecast to be a 6.9% dent to the nationwide economic system.
Muhammad Anwar Sadat of Bangladesh’s well being ministry warned that the nation couldn’t afford to disregard the size of the issue.
“If we do nothing,” he instructed AFP, “the number of people affected will multiply three or fourfold in the next two years.”
© 2025 AFP
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Battery increase drives Bangladesh lead poisoning epidemic (2025, April 1)
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