November/December 2010
Lead processors serve Jamnagar’s brass industry as well as India’s growing consumer demand for batteries.
By Adam Minter
Where there’s brass, there’s usually lead. And in Jamnagar, which reportedly consumes more brass than any other city in India, the lead industry thrives. It’s growing in response to domestic Indian demand for batteries, and it’s increasingly looking abroad for scrap.
The average Jamnagar lead facility is unlikely to meet U.S. or EU regulatory standards, but some plants are surprisingly high-tech and environmentally conscious—and if current trends hold, others will soon follow. Plenty of small smelters still use primitive techniques, though. For example, it’s necessary to walk a plank over the mud and a drainage channel to enter the two-story foundry and workshop of Ambica Trading, the leading lead merchant in GIDC2, Jamnagar’s second major industrial park. I met Ambica owner Sureshbhai Maheshwari when he was picking up payment for a small load of lead rods he had delivered to a local brass foundry.
This 20-year-old business produces 3 mt a day of lead for Jamnagar’s brass factories, resulting in a profit of about US$100 a day—good money, by Jamnagar’s small-business standards. Ambica smelts automobile battery lead that the company purchases as ingot or as raw plates extracted from batteries. A few of those ingots are stacked beside the building and a shed protected by a blue tarp. Maheshwari pulls away the tarp to reveal his stove-sized furnace and the large steel wok atop it in which he melts lead. He pours the molten metal into thin bricks that, when cooled, he can flatten into long strips. With the help of his wife and a few employees, Maheshwari cuts the strips into wire that easily can be added to molten brass.
The factory is exceedingly simple: The rooms are large, bright, and uncluttered. Open windows provide ventilation. To call the facility primitive is not quite accurate. Maheshwari has the equipment he needs to get his product to market, nothing more. So far, it seems, his business is too small to be the target of environmental officials.
About 10 minutes away on the edge of GIDC2, and one step higher along the lead recycling chain, is Axis Alloy Industries, a leading supplier to Ambica Trading. As we enter, Maheshwari is eager to show me the company’s environmental management practices. Inside the metal gate, stacks of unbroken batteries and extracted lead line both sides of a narrow work area. There’s a pile of battery connectors nearby, and a wall covered in empty battery casings just beyond it. At the far end of the work area is a shower-sized concrete basin for draining batteries. By developing-country standards, this is an exceedingly well-organized and even clean operation, more orderly than almost anything I’ve seen in China or other parts of Asia. By developed-country standards, it’s still well below par.
The plant has two furnaces, one for smelting and one for refining, connected to a bag house. Each month it handles roughly 100 mt of batteries and produces 30 mt to 40 mt of ingots. Unlike Ambica Trading, it’s a highly regulated business: The licensing process takes two years and multiple, ongoing inspections. Shailesh Patel, one owner/operator of this family company, tells me Jamnagar has five or six plants just like his, but in nearby Ahmedabad, where environmental regulation is more lax, there are 30 to 40 unauthorized plants that operate without any pollution controls at all.
Patel walks with me from the drainage area to a set of pumps and equipment to treat the battery acid. The acid is carbon-filtered, diluted, and returned to the water supply. A garden grows on the path across from the equipment; Patel tells me that the water is clean enough for flowers “and to drink.” When I ask if he’d like to drink some with me, he laughs—and declines. I pass, too.
Axis Alloy Industries is one example of a small, environmentally conscious battery recycler in Jamnagar. But its costs are relatively high, especially compared with its poorly regulated competitors in Ahmedabad, thus it’s likely to remain small and local unless regulators expand their scope into neighboring communities—something that’s by no means guaranteed in the short to medium term. To grow and succeed with this competition, a company will need to move beyond recycling and raw-material supply and enter into high-quality manufacturing operations. In other words, it needs scale and capital to pay for technology and pollution controls.
Both are on display 20 minutes away, at Gold Star Battery’s large, multi-building complex. Executive Director Navneet Pansara, the son of the company’s founder, leads me into the company’s cracking and recycling operation, located beneath a worker’s dorm. The operation is well-organized and seems to have extensive environmental controls: The acids and other chemicals are siphoned and filtered; the smelting furnaces are connected to elaborate filters and bag houses. But worker safety protections are still lacking: workers in shirtsleeves and, often, sandals manage the furnaces.
Each month the company buys 500 mt of domestically sourced batteries and another 500 mt of imported batteries, which come from the Middle East, Africa, and—occasionally—the United States and Europe. (Battery importing is a fully licensed activity, according to the customs official I met at the Gold Star offices.) The company uses 700 mt of the batteries it imports and trades the rest in the local markets. The company’s lead needs are about to expand significantly, however. In an adjacent building, Chinese workers are installing an advanced Chinese battery recycling plant. (“China has the world’s biggest auto battery market, so [that country has] the best technology” for battery recycling, Pansara tells me.) The new plant is a slick, clean operation that stands in stark contrast to the company’s—and Jamnagar’s—other, mostly primitive battery recycling operations. When it’s finished, Gold Star’s lead appetite will reach 1,200 mt a month, 500 mt more than it currently consumes, leaving the company to seek new sources and maintain its trading business. And even bigger plans are in the works: The company plans to purchase an Italian-made automated smelting plant that can handle batteries at a rate of 6 mt an hour, 150 mt a day, and 2,600 mt a month. This—not the small, polluting plants prevalent across India and other parts of Asia—is Jamnagar’s future.
After a tour of the company’s battery manufacturing operations, Pansara leads me into a sparkling-clean warehouse where workers pack batteries for uninterrupted power supply systems. The warehouse’s neatness is a startling contrast to the company’s grimy recycling operations. The UPS devices are popular with computer owners plagued by India’s poor and unreliable electricity supply, Pansara tells me. “India’s PC market is growing faster than India’s electrical grid, so our business grows with it. That’s why we’re going to need more lead supply, and soon.” The growing Indian consumer market will no doubt provide some of that supply, but the domestic supply isn’t growing nearly as fast as demand, so Pansara knows that Gold Star—and Jamnagar—will need to look abroad. The local customs department has long allowed the company to import batteries, he says, and it’s a practice that he intends to expand in the coming months, creating a significant opportunity for Jamnagar and for battery exporters around the world.
Adam Minter is a journalist based in Shanghai, where he writes about business and culture for U.S. and international publications. He also maintains a blog at www.shanghaiscrap.com.
Lead processors serve Jamnagar’s brass industry as well as India’s growing consumer demand for batteries.