ULABs Wrapped 2025
A year in review
This has been a pretty big year for ULABs!
The biggest change was that the broader consensus in lead poisoning world has shifted towards recognizing that ULABs are one of the largest sources of lead poisoning and there’s a pressing need to develop scalable solutions.
There’s still a lot of work to be done — there are a ton of open questions at basically every level, from source attribution to solution implementation — but there is starting to be real momentum.
This is my attempt to pull together some interesting links/research/developments, mostly in the ULAB world, from the past year. If I missed your thing, I’m sorry! (Email me and I’ll add it.)
New organizations
The most exciting thing to see this year was the launch of a couple of new organizations focused on ULABs.
The Lead Acid Battery Recycling Initiative (LABRI) launched in April and is focused on bringing market-based policy solutions to LMICs to reduce lead poisoning from ULAB recycling. They’re currently kicking-off work in the Phillippines.
LABRI was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship, the same organization that launched Lead Research for Action (LeRA) late last year.
The Partnership for Battery Action, which is being launched by the Global Development Incubator, has also kicked off and I expect you’ll be seeing more from them soon. Pb Action is working on identifying and evaluating ULAB recyclers in LMICs to allow governments and lead buyers to understand which recyclers should and shouldn’t be be sourced from to reduce lead poisoning.
They’re also doing the incredibly valuable work of developing a new set of standards to provide transparency into what safer recycling looks like in LMIC contexts, and how improvements can be effectively scaled globally.
Funding
There’s now more funding coming into the space. Not all of this has been publicly documented, but global public health donors are starting to direct more funding both to lead poisoning generally ULABs specifically. This is very good.
Bloomberg Philanthropies has created a new funding pool for lead poisoning-related grants up to $100K, you can apply through a few partners (Pure Earth, LEEP, and Vital Strategies).
The Center for Global Development (CGD) also distributed a decent amount of money to fund lead poisoning research.
Events
CGD hosted the First Annual Research Conference on Global Lead Exposure in June. If you didn’t get to attend, you can watch the recordings here and here.
GDI also hosted a fun battery-focused side event, it was great to see a lot of you there.
Calls for submissions to next year’s CGD lead poisoning conference (June 3-4 2026 in London) are now open and are due by Jan 31, 2026. Details here.
Research
All together, less ULAB-specific research than I would have loved to see this year. There remains a lot of low-hanging fruit here (probably worth a separate post).
There is also lots of interesting internal research that is not getting published — please publish, at least informally, your interesting internal research!
One of the biggest pieces of research done this year hasn’t been published yet, but provides strong evidence that ULABs are one of the leading causes of lead poisoning across LMICs. I’ll flag this once it’s out.
Emilie Berkhout et al. analyzed the causal impact of living near lead-contaminated sites on education outcomes in Indonesia, finding “children who were exposed … scored -0.48 s.d. lower in a test of numeracy and -0.36 s.d. lower in a test of general cognitive ability if they lived within 3 kilometers of the toxic site compared with those who lived beyond 6 kilometers.”
Amrita Kundu et al. published a working paper on the role of information in Bangladesh’s lead-acid battery markets. They find that retailers provide inconsistent information about battery lifespan, and generally offer better pricing and more accurate information to wealthier customers.
Jamal et al. published an analysis of material flows and pollution from ULAB recycling in Bangladesh. By surveying a handful of both formal and informal firms and doing mass balance analysis, they estimated around 85% of the ULAB-related lead pollution in Bangladesh comes from informal firms due to their substantially higher (10% vs the formal sector’s 2%) loss rates during recycling.
Lead poisoning in Bangladesh also seems to be starting to get a little better according to a nationally representative survey released this year? However, 20 million children (38%) had elevated BLLs. (Also, nationally representative BLL studies are great and we should have more of them.)
Chris Kinally et al. published a relatively comprehensive literature review of the existing attribution evidence for various sources of lead poisoning.
Bret Ericson and Mary Jean Brown published updated estimates of the productivity losses in LMICs attributable to lead poisoning, finding $300-$500 billion in productivity losses annually.
Veronique Gille et al. published results from an RCT in Cote d’Ivoire, where they distributed Lumetallix-like test kits that glowed in the dark to pregnant women. This substantially increased awareness of lead exposure risk, and a combination of this testing and XRF demonstrations seems to have had some behavioral impacts, although I would have loved to see BLL outcome data.
Media
The biggest story was the multi-part investigation from the New York Times and the Examination into ULAB recycling in Nigeria and the extent to which unsafely recycled lead flows back to American battery manufacturers. All of the parts are worth a read:
The article seems to have hit hard both in the U.S. and Nigeria, and Nigeria has since closed several unsafe recyclers. It remains to be seen how long this scaled-up enforcement will last, and the Nigerian government actually did something similar a couple months before.
Vox’s Pratik Pawar wrote a great article on the harms of unsafe ULAB recycling and potential policy solutions to fix it.
The book Murderland about serial killers in the U.S. and the potential lead poisoning link came out and was well-received, although I have not yet read it. (NYT review of the book here).
The Substack
Had a range of posts this year, and hope to have a bunch more stuff coming soon.
The best of these, I think, is the detailed analysis of how China solved its lead-acid battery problem.
It’s also worth reading last year’s Brazil case study if you haven’t already.
Other articles, in chronological order:
Our analysis of ULAB recycling supply chains in Nigeria
A tool for analyzing global lead and lead-acid battery trade flows
Some data around how bad using ULAB acid as a household cleaning solution is (it seems to be not great but probably not super widespread or worth prioritizing)
A guest post from LABRI about ULAB recycling in the Philippines and why they’re working there first
As always, I am incredibly flattered by and grateful to all 129 of you that currently subscribe to the Substack and am always thinking about how to make it more valuable and interesting to you. If you have anything you’d like to see, please let me know!