ECONOMICS POISON PETROL
Leaded Gas Exports to the Third World By Kenny Bruno Kenny Bruno is the campaigner for the Hazardous Export/Import Prevention Project at Greenpeace in Boston, Massachusetts. A version of this article appears in the forthcoming issue of Greenpeace Magazine. "The mining and smelting of lead and the dispersal of manufactured lead products within the human environment is actually a monumental crime committed by humanity against itself." -Clair Patterson, geochemist with the National Academy of Sciences A RECENT SPATE OF PUBLICITY has alerted U.S. citizens to the ongoing danger of exposure to lead. Children are especially susceptible to lead poisoning, and the devastating effects include low birth weight, decreased intelligence, behavioral abnormalities and other lifelong, irreversible damage. Focused on lead in paint and drinking water, articles in national magazines and segments on television news programs have discussed how to remove this threat to the lives of U.S. children. But almost no attention has been devoted to the role that two U.S. companies, as well as a British one, have played in elevating air lead levels in Third World cities far above levels in the United States. Banned in the United States, lead additive for gasoline--supplied by the three multinationals--is still used heavily in the Third World. The consequences are dire. "Children in the Third World continue to be subjected to a poisonous assault from high-lead gasoline," says David Schwartzman, professor of geology at Howard University. With the increased use of automobiles in developing countries, Schwartzman says, lead levels in the air are becoming so high that "we can reasonably expect childhood lead poisoning to reach truly epidemic proportions in many Third World cities." Lead from gasoline accounts for 80 to 90 percent of all environmental lead contamination, reports Dr. Carl Shy, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina. This fact, coupled with the recognition that very low levels of exposure to lead interferes with the development of the brain and central nervous system in children, has led to a decline in the use of leaded fuel in most of the industrialized world. "The removal of lead from gasoline has had a fantastic effect in children [in the United States]," states Dr. Sergio Piomelli, a hematologist and long-time lead researcher at Columbia University's Children's Hospital in New York. Throughout the Third World, however, people and especially children are being exposed to perilously high levels of lead. In Mexico, which uses almost seven percent of the world's lead additive, high blood lead levels are threatening the intelligence of an entire generation of Mexican children. Four million cars pump 32 tons of lead into the air every day in Mexico City. In Nigeria, an unpublished report by Jerome Nriagu, a Nigerian scientist who works for the Canadian National Water Research Institute, recently found that roadside dust had as much as 6,000 parts per million lead. By comparison, paint is excluded from household use in the United States at one tenth that level. In Alexandria, Egypt, where gasoline contains extremely high levels of lead and air lead levels are often double the European Community's (EC) recommended limits, central nervous system dysfunction has been discovered among traffic controllers. In Buenos Aires, air lead levels have been measured at 3.9 micrograms per cubic meter in the daytime and 1.7 micrograms per cubic meter at night, according to Dr. Mario Epelman of Greenpeace's Latin America Project. The World Health Organization, European Region's recommended average lead exposure limit for a 24-hour period is 1 microgram per cubic meter of air. In Guatemala City, air lead levels in 1980 were comparable to those for U.S. cities in the late 1960s, when leaded gasoline use was at its peak in the United States. In Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, motor vehicles collectively pump a ton and a half of lead into the air each day, according to the Wall Street Journal. The dangers of lead contamination for children in the Third World are compounded by problems common in developing countries. Nriagu explains that "because of the narrow streets and overcrowding in urban areas in developing countries; because of the prevalence of contaminated dusts both indoor and outdoor; because of poor nutrition and health, poor hygienic conditions and the preponderance of pregnant women and children, the populations of developing countries are much more susceptible to the hazards of environmental lead contamination." The corporate polluters Last spring, the U.S.-based chemical giant DuPont ended its U.S. production of tetraethyl lead (TEL), the gasoline anti-knock compound which is responsible for killing dozens of workers and poisoning countless children. The decline in the production of a substance which has been called "the mistake of the twentieth century" by Dr. Shy, writing for the World Health Organization, should be a cause for celebration. Yet DuPont continues to produce TEL in Mexico. DuPont, U.K.-based Associated Octel and U.S.-based Ethyl Corporation continue to profit from poisoning the environment by marketing TEL in countries where lead regulations are lax. TEL, like toxic waste and many dangerous pesticides, has become a hazard for export. Tetraethyl lead was invented and first marketed in 1924, when the U.S. auto industry was at a crossroads [see "DuPont's Duplicity: Profiting at the Planet's Expense," Multinational Monitor, March 1990]. The industry had to choose between relatively small, efficient engines which would rely on higher grade gasoline, and larger, higher compression engines which would require a lead additive to boost octane levels. Even in the 1920s, experts warned that lead additives would have disastrous consequences for public health. Dr. Alice Hamilton, one of the country's foremost experts on lead at the time, said she doubted that any effective measures could be implemented to protect the general public from the hazards of widespread use of leaded gasoline. "You may control the conditions within a factory," she said. "But how are you going to control the whole country?" Hamilton's warnings went unheeded, however, and a heavy promotional assault on regulators by the industry--Ethyl, for example, proclaimed TEL a "gift from God"--carried the day. Thus the industry, represented by managers from the interlocking companies of DuPont, Ethyl and General Motors, opted for bigger cars and bigger engines which would require TEL. That decision resulted in millions of dollars in profits for the corporations, and grave consequences for millions of people spanning several generations. By the 1970s, world gasoline lead consumption reached 350,000 tons per year (270,000 in the United States alone), making it one of the largest volume chemicals produced. Air lead levels in U.S. cities reached dangerous levels and elevated blood levels in children became common. Today, TEL consumption is declining by about 10 percent a year, but most of the decline is in Europe, with lead levels remaining high in many Third World cities. Despite an international scientific consensus to the contrary, the TEL manufacturers justify their international marketing of this poisonous product by denying that leaded gasoline causes damage to children. In a claim reminiscent of those made by the tobacco industry regarding cancer, Floyd Gottwald, chief executive officer of Ethyl, claims that "no conclusive scientific evidence has ever linked the use of lead in gasoline to human health problems." Maintaining this absurd insistence on the safety of their product, Ethyl and Octel continue to sell TEL all over the world, while DuPont continues to manufacture TEL in Mexico, even though health and environmental problems have driven the company out of the business back home. A sunset product The TEL manufacturers claim that world transportation would be crippled if they phased TEL out of production. But technology for the replacement of lead additive is now available, with modern gasoline refining techniques and alternative octane boosters able to produce high octane fuel without lead. Even the minute amount of TEL helpful for valve seat protection became unnecessary as car manufacturers replaced soft valve seats with hardened ones. In the United States, the requirement that all new cars be equipped with catalytic converters signalled the eventual demise of TEL, since lead poisons the converters. With the health threat well known and alternatives available, leaded gasoline has virtually disappeared in the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia, and its use is rapidly declining in Western Europe. Leaded gasoline still is used in the rest of the world, primarily because modernization of refineries requires investments, and most alternative octane boosters cost at least 2-3 cents per gallon more than TEL. In the absence of regulations, gasoline refiners in much of the world--both transnational corporations such as Shell, Esso (Exxon) and British Petroleum and state-owned oil companies such as Pemex in Mexico, YPF in Argentina and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation--have chosen to continue using lead to boost octane. But it is widely believed throughout the industry that TEL is a sunset product, its elimination only a matter of time. The TEL manufacturers' refusal to phase out production contributes significantly to the delay in worldwide conversion to unleaded gasoline. Getting the lead out The switch to unleaded fuel in industrial countries has been one of the few truly successful--albeit late--examples of pollution prevention. This kind of prevention works because the emissions are eliminated almost entirely at the source. Studies show that air lead levels declined in U.S. cities as the use of leaded gasoline declined. In addition, the removal of lead from gasoline has resulted in a significant decline in lead poisoning cases. In New York City, prior to 1975, when lead was taken out of gasoline, three out of every 10 children tested had blood lead levels higher than the Centers for Disease Control's recommended limit, according to Piomelli of Columbia University's Children's Hospital. After 1975, that figure decreased twenty-fold, to three in 200. Some countries in Latin America are now beginning to look at measures to stop this attack on the brain development of their children. Mexico, with perhaps the worst problem in the hemisphere, has reduced the lead content of its gasoline dramatically since 1980. In Argentina, Greenpeace's Epelman has called on the government to prohibit the import of TEL from the industrialized world and has put together a plan for the phase- out of leaded gasoline by 1996. There is no technological impediment to preventing almost all of the lead contamination stemming from the use of leaded gasoline. While its continued use is a tragedy, at least the possibility exists of overcoming the deadly decision made by the auto and petrochemical industries in the 1920s. "Today we have one gasoline for the rich countries of North America and another, deadlier gasoline for Latin America," says Epelman. "But I'm sure that soon, with the cooperation of various sectors of society in both North and South, we will be better able to protect the health of our children and our environment."