Closing the Chain: From Used Lead-Acid Battery Recycling to Children’s Blood Lead, Learning, and Policy in Kenya

With Anirban Basu, Arijeet Mitra, and Kathrin Schilling (Columbia University).

Builds directly on The Hidden Costs of Recycling. Around the 26 used-lead-acid-battery recycling plants of that natural experiment and matched control communities, the project combines environmental sampling with lead-isotope fingerprinting to attribute children’s lead burden to its sources, measures blood lead for 3,120 children with validated point-of-care screening against ICP-MS reference measurement, and pairs measured exposure with learning assessments to deliver an in-situ blood-lead-to-learning dose-response from an informal-recycling setting. Regulatory histories of the 26 sites support before-and-after comparisons of which enforcement actions reduce exposure. Study design phase.