Although North America and Europe continue to be the world's biggest buyers of cars, fewer and fewer car batteries are made there. Manufacturing has moved where labor is cheaper and environmental protections regulations are more lenient, or at least more leniently enforced.
"There's not a developing country where this isn't happening," says Perry Gottesfeld, of OK International.
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The article presents itself as the unfolding mystery of children and animals dying. It unfolds as a case of poisoning by industrial substances that almost everybody can understand. It exemplifies the worldwide problems of unknown poisons destroying our biosphere, and is a clear example of the dangers of exploiting cheap labor in countries without well developed environmental protections.
The World Health Organization says there’s still so much lead in the ground that the area is toxic. The government wants to relocate the entire neighborhood. But Demba Diaw says the government just wants to profit from the lead in their earth, and Coumba says this is her only home. Like many other families, the Diaws are too poor and too rooted to move. So they will stay where the lead poisons the earth.
We are all too poor to leave Earth. We must keep it clean.
The tragedy of Thiaroye Sur Mer gives a glimpse at how the globalization of a modern tool – the car battery – can wreak havoc in the developing world.
Gout, prevalent in affluent Rome, is thought to be the result of lead, or leaded eating and drinking vessels. Lead was used in makeup. Sugar of lead (lead(II) acetate) was used to sweeten wine, and the gout that resulted from this was known as saturnine gout
In what instance, with another substance, could poisons reach out to affect a large number of people and creatures? We know of pollution killing all life in rivers and lakes. We know of mercury from China coal burning polluting U.S. lakes. We know plastics can cause sexual changes. What do we know of GMOs, electronics recycling, flushed pharmaceuticals?