Recycling Injustice: Lead-Toxicity Publics and the Struggle over Sustainability

Abstract

In 2015, after operating for decades in a five-square-mile industrial zone of Southeast Los Angeles, Exide Technologies shut down its battery recycling plant to avoid prosecution from federal investigators for continuously spewing toxic chemicals into the air and soil of six surrounding residential communities. With nearly $200 million already spent on the remediation of the site, the cleanup, once completed, will be the largest and most expensive of its kind in California’s history. Yet scientists and industry voices have touted lead-acid battery recycling as a model example for the management of hazardous by-products of our energy sources (Socolow and Thomas 1997); the high recycling rates of car batteries theoretically preclude the extraction of lead for the production of new ones, thus constituting a supposedly sustainable cycle of energy use. This article explores the case of the Exide plant through a mediating infrastructure approach (Mukherjee 2016) that foregrounds the entanglement of the plant’s material and discursive aspects. This approach allows for a consideration not only of how the plant has been differently mediated by its various constituent actors—from scientists and corporate representatives to regulators and community members—but also of how the plant itself, and its poisoning of the soil in particular, mediates the formation of publics who come together in response to its toxicity. I term these formations lead-toxicity publics. By turning our attention to lead-toxicity publics and their mediations of the site, the tensions inherent in dominant understandings of environmental justice and its relationship to the state and to capital come into sharper focus. As such, this article contributes to a wider critique of sustainability and its cooptation by the interests of the state and capital (Parr 2012) and calls for the articulation of better alternatives.