Exide lead contamination

Los Angeles County, California (Vernon)

For decades, a battery recycling plant in Vernon, a heavily industrialized city in southeast Los Angeles County, released toxic lead dust into the air. The 15-acre facility, which processed over 11 million used lead batteries each year, contaminated as many as 10,000 homes across six working-class, Latino communities. Lead, a neurotoxin, can cause cognitive deficits and developmental delays.

Exide Technologies took over the smelter in 2000 after buying Gould-National Battery. The plant had operated under a provisional permit since 1981, even as violations were documented. Residents in Boyle Heights, Maywood, East Los Angeles, Commerce, Bell, and Huntington Park complained for years before state and federal agencies acted. In 2013, Exide faced a federal criminal investigation for emitting high levels of pollutants.

In March 2015, the company agreed to close permanently, avoiding prosecution for environmental crimes including illegal hazardous waste storage and disposal. It paid $50 million for demolition and cleanup, with $9 million set aside to remove lead from homes. The soil beneath the facility and local groundwater remain polluted, with corrosive sulfates draining onto public streets.

Environmental contamination record elsewhere in the US

Exide Technologies operates in six of the 21 areas the EPA has flagged for violating federal lead air quality standards, making it the single largest corporate contributor to these violations. Its noncompliant plants are located in Frisco, Texas; Vernon, California; Muncie, Indiana; Salina, Kansas; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Bristol, Tennessee. The company’s history includes a predecessor, the Electric Storage Battery Company, which ran a lead-acid battery factory in Philadelphia from 1920 to 1978.

In 1973, the EPA estimated that a typical lead-acid battery plant released 11 pounds of lead into the air each day. From 1989 to 2015, Exide’s Muncie smelter emitted over 227,275 pounds of toxic pollutants, including lead, sulfuric acid, and arsenic. By November 2010, the high airborne lead concentrations from that plant had placed Muncie and Delaware County on the EPA’s nonattainment list.

Community's responses

Community activists are driving a growing national conversation about environmental justice. One leader, mark! Lopez, received the 2017 Goldman Environmental Prize for work with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice addressing lead contamination from the Exide plant in southeast Los Angeles.

Lopez and others pressured state lawmakers to act after decades of complaints from residents went unanswered. Community activists and environmental scholars have argued that major polluters like Exide have been able to release massive amounts of pollution by exploiting government inaction regarding poor and minority populations. At a South Coast Air Quality Management District board hearing, the mayor of Maywood, Oscar Magana, stated that he thought the Department of Toxic Substances Control and the SCAQMD would have closed the Exide plant in Vernon much sooner if it had been placed in Beverly Hills or another affluent community.

Sears Battery fraud scandal

In 2001, Exide admitted to conspiring to commit fraud and paid a $27.5 million fine to resolve a federal probe into battery sales to Sears. The investigation found Exide had worked with Sears to pass off used batteries as new and had paid bribes to hide the scheme.

The following year, two former Exide executives were imprisoned for selling faulty batteries to Sears for its DieHard line. Exide president Douglas N. Pearson got a five-year, four-month sentence and a $150,000 fine, while former CEO Arthur M. Hawkins received a 10-year term and a $1 million fine. Both were convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy.