Battery recycler leaves a poisoned legacy

LOS ANGELES - Since she was 13, Tiffany Arroyo had lived with the smoke and rotten-egg smell from an Exide battery-recycling plant just blocks from her grandparents' home in Laureldale, Berks County, Pa.

"It was horrible, just horrible, to go outside and smell it," Arroyo, 30, said of the recently idled facility. "And the stuff that came out of the chimney, you could see it just everywhere for miles."

So much lead dust poured from the plant, which Exide acquired in the 1980s, that it contaminated hundreds of residential properties, including her grandparents' yard.

The emissions prompted the 1996 closure of a nearby park and lake, which only recently reopened. Exide has removed tainted soil from the 25-acre park, but Arroyo said she still won't take her 6-year-old daughter there to play.

Exide Technologies, one of the world's largest makers and recyclers of lead-acid batteries, has left a trail of pollution and health worries across the country. Since November, it has closed or suspended operations at three U.S. recycling operations in the face of public and political pressure. Over the years, it has left communities struggling with decades-old contamination and questioning why regulators didn't act sooner.

The Georgia-based company continues to recycle batteries in Missouri and Indiana after halting operations at plants in California, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

In April, California officials suspended operations at an Exide lead recycler - or smelter - in Vernon, citing emissions of arsenic as a health risk to 110,000 people in surrounding communities.

Since 2010, seven Exide operations, including one in Reading, Pa., have been linked to ambient airborne lead levels that posed a health risk, a review of EPA and local and state government data showed.

The company, which for years had operations in the Philadelphia region, spends "millions of dollars a year monitoring and remediating problems," spokeswoman Susan Jaramillo said, adding that the company takes its obligations "very seriously."