Illegal battery factories, lead pollution thrive as 'unauthorised' e-rickshaws take over streets

Recently, around 40 workers were busy dismantling lead batteries at an open pit for lead, called a bhatti, at Bangaon, located on the outskirts of Dhaka. 

It's dangerous work that comes with the risk of lead poisoning and little pay. Inamul Hoque, 35, one of the workers – who are mostly from the flood-prone Gaibandha – works for 12 hours a day to salvage a minimum of five tonnes of lead scrap. 

"We can hardly fetch Tk8,000-Tk10,000 a month," he said. The remuneration is neither reflective of the risk nor the fact that the bhatti workers – generally debt-fatigued and marginalised 'cheap' labour – are the nuts and bolts behind the supply chain of lead batteries. 

The demand for lead batteries has grown over the years owing to the rise in the use of zero-emission customised e-rickshaws – banned by the government in 2021 on major roads following the High Court directives since 2014 citing them as risky and unregistered.

Not only that, the batteries used are not certified by Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution (BSTI). And unregulated and unauthorised lead factories pose a plethora of health risks. 

But despite all this, there still remain more than 3 million e-rickshaws in Bangladesh currently, according to the Battery-run Easybike and Rickshaw Drivers' Movement Council, which has branches in 50 districts. 

It's not, however, all doom and gloom. Lead batteries are a prospective additional Tk500-1,000 crore per annum industry, but without regulations in place, it's only a ticking time bomb.

The source: Tale of the bhattis

The Bangaon bhatti, one of the many bhattis across the country, was surfaced by broken chips of lead plates, electrode separators and plastic casings. There were water tanks where the scraps were washed. The breaking corner was muddy, perhaps drenched in disposed lead acid and water residue from the tanks.

Neighbouring the River Karnatali, the pit gets submerged every monsoon. In the dry season, local farmers grow vegetables on the surrounding lands.  

The lead comprises at least 70% of the battery used by e-rickshaws. As imported lead costs higher than locally recycled lead, the battery industries largely depend on the unauthorised 'bhattis'.

"Before 2010, there were about 50 bhattis. But now the number is more than 800," said  Munawar Misbah Moin, President of the Accumulator Battery Manufacturers and Exporters Association of Bangladesh (ABMEAB).

Informal battery manufacturers do not pay taxes for the pit-generated lead, nor do the bhatti operators invest in compliance requirements like Effluent Treatment Plants (ETP).

New York-based environmental organisation Pure Earth's Bangladesh chapter Director Mahfuzar Rahman said more than 90% of lead batteries are manufactured by recycling.

And a report by the UN Environment Programmes reveals that 1.5 million e-rickshaws (estimated in 2020) alone generated 90,000 tonnes of used lead batteries annually in Bangladesh. The estimation was based on a battery's 6-month life cycle.

If we consider the abundance of fast-depleting batteries (lasting less than 6 months) and the existing 3 million e-rickshaws in operation, the amount of used lead batteries is likely to be much higher. 

Department of Environment (DoE) rules prohibit open pits and the recycling of lead without environmental clearance. The rules also bind end-users to return the used batteries to the sellers, while the manufacturers are required to collect such used batteries and recycle them by themselves or hand them over to registered recyclers.

Moreover, the workers employed at bhattis are generally those from marginalised groups, according to Mohammad Lutful Kabir, a former field investigator of Pure Earth Bangladesh, who visited around  200 bhattis during 2016-2022. 

Workers at the bhatti had no idea how this crude recycling pollutes the environment. The Bangaon bhatti manager Manjur Rahman said, "This bhatti is set up on rented land. Next time you come, you won't find us right here. We will soon shift to another place if law enforcers raid us. We don't care how the land owner will use this land later."

Every time the workers shift pits to another place, they leave the land highly toxic, said Pure Earth Bangladesh officials. Between 2016 and February 2020, Pure Earth Bangladesh mapped at least 289 lead toxic sites: either functional or abandoned bhattis and lead battery factories. 

However, illegal operations of bhattis and factories go unabated due to a lack of law enforcement. According to DoE's enforcement wing, DoE filed 30 cases against illegal recyclers of lead, fined them Tk1.63 million, and jailed only one person for seven days between January 2019 and March 2023.

DoE Director General Abdul Hamid refused to comment on the matter. 

However, Saber Hossain Chowdhury, chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, stressed stricter law enforcement.

"The committee has proposed amendments to the rules, observing that the non-compliance operators make more profits than the penalty imposed upon them," Saber said.

The end-users: Tale of the e-rickshaw drivers 

Driving his battery-powered rickshaw at an erratic pace, Mahbub attempted to overtake a manual rickshaw in a Dhaka alley. He narrowly escaped colliding with an oncoming vehicle on one side and a pedestrian on the other. The frightened passerby swore at him as he sped away. 

When his passenger told him to slow down, the 30-year-old former vegetable seller who began driving his e-rickshaw just six months ago, retorted, "Why should I lag behind a slow manual rickshaw?" 

Mahbub is among the hundreds who drive e-rickshaws across the country. It allows them to make more trips for less labour than manually pulling rickshaws. And like Mahbub's vehicle, unauthorised, locally customised e-rickshaws are supplanting manual ones as demand grows for cheaper and faster transport. E-rickshaw fares may cost Tk10-20 less than that of manual ones. 

A survey by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) showed that between 2009 and 2018, the number of new e-rickshaws increased from 7.84% to 28.78%, while new manual rickshaws decreased to 12.07% from 34.48%.

Conventional rickshaws can be paddled at a maximum speed of 20km/hr. "When it is customised with a motor, its speed range widens to 40km/hr or more, making its manual disk-brake system vulnerable," said Professor Ziaur Rahman Khan, an electrical and electronic engineering lecturer at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET).

Chan Miah, a 60-year-old man who pulled rickshaws in Melandaha village of Jamalpur for three decades, felt cornered by e-rickshaws and recently migrated to Dhaka.

"But here too, the battery-rickshaw drivers are dominating," he said. 

In 2019, the e-rickshaws (23% of all types of transports surveyed) outnumbered the manual rickshaws (20%), according to a BBS survey.

Professor Musleh Uddin Hasan, a transportation policy expert who teaches urban and regional planning at BUET, said, "No doubt, this is a transition. But the distribution of benefits and burdens of this transition is disproportionate."

Musleh observed that initially, the authorities ignored the customised e-rickshaw. Then some vested interest groups indulged in their unabated growth. When they became a road safety threat, the High Court banned them. "But ignoring the court's order, these 'unauthorised' e-rickshaws are thriving," the professor said.

He added that the zero-emission e-rickshaws are actually replacing non-motorised transports, rather than fossil-fueled ones.

Alleged links between lead batteries and 'illegal' factories

Old Dhaka-based Razim Auto House sells its own brand of MR Power batteries through 300 country-wide distributors. But the brand has no approval from the Bangladesh Standard and Testing Institution.

Mehedi Hasan Razim, the proprietor, said there are more than 100 local brands in the market. "Most of them are substandard," he said. 

MR Power batteries come from two factories, but Razim refused to give details about them as they were not registered under the Ministry of Industries.

Bangladesh's formal battery industry mainly produces wet lead batteries for the automobile, telecommunication and solar sectors.

According to Munawar Misbah Moin, ABMEAB President and also group director at the country's pioneering battery company Rahimafrooz, the overall size of the battery market is more than Tk10,000 crore, 75% of which is "illegal."  

He also said locally customised e-rickshaws first created a demand for dry lead batteries, which were initially imported through under-invoicing from China. 

Recently, this correspondent reached out to two factories — ATL Battery and Geli Industrial — at Sreepur in Gazipur. 

Both of the factories were fenced by high concrete walls. The watchmen blocked journalists from entering the premises, saying the owners had stopped operations long ago. 

But near ATL Battery, worker Khalid (pseudonym), said some 25 workers salvage lead from used batteries and produce new lead plates at the factory under the supervision of some "Chinese instructors". 

ATL Battery's Managing Director AKM Farid Uddin Ahmed claimed his 12-year-old factory, with a monthly production capacity of 900 tonnes of lead plates, has all necessary permits. He declined to comment on any partnerships.

Ahmed Belal, the deputy inspector general for Gazipur at the Department of Inspection for Factories and Establishments (DIFE), said that the renewal of ATL Battery's compliance certificate is pending because of allegations of legal violations. 

Belal added that Geli Industrial, where at least 50 workers produce lead ingots, was never given a compliance certificate as the company has violated labour laws several times.

This correspondent first visited Geli Industrial on 15 November last year when the Department of Environment (DoE) fined the factory Tk2 lakh for polluting the environment. 

On the second visit on 27 April, 56-year-old local farmer Ataul Sarker, owner of a 1.33-acre cropland adjacent to the factory, complained some of his crops had been damaged that season by effluent from the factory.

Geli Industrial's Director Nina Wong did not respond to phone calls or emails.

Jeopardised environment, public health

All the open-pit and lead factory workers interviewed said they arrange safety gear, such as hand gloves and rubber boots, on their own. They never wear masks. When smelting lead, they sometimes wrap their noses with rags.

They said they never felt severe physical problems during their 12-15 months of service period.

Then, what would be the health impacts on the workers?

According to a study, titled 'Blood Lead Levels and Health Problems of Lead Acid Battery Workers in Bangladesh' and published on Hindawi, workers involved in lead recycling were found to have 66-78 micrograms per decilitre (μg/dL) of blood lead levels (BLL).

One of the authors of the study, Professor Manzurul Haque Khan, former chairman of the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health under the National Institute of Preventive and Social Medicine, said, "It would take 10 years to show the symptoms: wrist-drop, high blood pressure, anaemia, and chronic nephropathy, which may progress to kidney failure."

Manzurul added that lead toxicity affects both adults and children while the latter are more susceptible.

In collaboration with UNICEF, Pure Earth and Directorate General of Health Services, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) traced children —  dwelling near lead recycling sites at Mirzapur and Kathgora — to have BLL higher than World Health Organization's (WHO) reference value of 5 μg/dL.

"There are various sources of lead poisoning. But lead battery recycling is found as an important source," said icddr,b's EIU Lead and Project Coordinator Mahbubur Rahman.

According to WHO, exposure to lead can affect children's brain development, resulting in reduced intelligence quotients (IQs).

Arif Mohiuddin Sikder, Associate Professor, Centre for Environmental Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University, has been researching lead pollution for more than a decade in collaboration with Dhaka University's Department of Geology and Pure Earth. 

In a survey, Arif and his co-researchers found high concentrations of lead in the soils around 200-300 metres of bhattis. 

Arif said lead from batteries becomes toxic to the environment and health soon after the casings are dismantled. The heavy metal, though is not soluble in water, may intrude into human blood by inhalation, ingestion, and dermal contact with lead-polluted soil.

"A lead worker can carry particles to his home and poison his children. We found such samples in their clothes," Arif said.  

Moreover, lead could find a pathway to our food chain if crops are cultivated on a toxic site. A study titled 'Lead (Pb) Contamination in Agricultural Products and Human Health Risk Assessment in Bangladesh' published in June 2022 on Springer Nature, found a high value of lead in harvested rice, wheat and vegetables cultivated in the neighbourhoods of lead recycling fields in Bangladesh. 

Remedies? 

Manzurul and Arif both recommended that the Bangladesh government strictly implement the existing environmental laws to make the informal lead battery industries compliant.

This correspondent sought comments from the Bangladesh China Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCCI) organisers, which already has three members who are producing batteries with compliance certificates.

"If we have a list of illegal factory operators, we will motivate them for compliance," BCCCI Joint General Secretary Al Mamun Mridha said.

Concerned groups believe that making battery factories compliant and bringing e-vehicles under regulation in Bangladesh shall go hand in hand. 

Arif Mohiuddin Sikder estimated that if the government could properly regulate or make the lead battery industry 'formal,' there would be Tk500-Tk1000 crore additional revenue generated annually. Because then, Arif explained, each battery factory, brand and end user will pay certain taxes and VAT to the government.   

Considering the need to protect livelihoods, the government is planning to issue registration to drivers of e-vehicles like easybikes. On 30 March, Prime Minister's Energy Adviser Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury hinted about the matter, saying a BUET team was assigned to expedite the process.

BUET Professor Ziaur Rahman Khan, who has been involved in the process, however, said, "Locally customised e-rickshaws are not in our consideration because these are unsafe. The drivers may get registration on condition of driving remodified rickshaws recommended by the authorities."

Khalequzzaman Lipon, convenor of the Battery-run Easybike and Rickshaw Drivers' Movement Council did not contradict Ziaur. But he demanded that the government incentivise thousands of e-rickshaw drivers like Mahbub with soft loans so that they could shift to safer vehicles in phases.  

This story was produced with the help of the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The content is the sole responsibility of the author and the publisher.