Lead-acid battery recycling in Philippines

Description of proposed project

The Lead-Acid Battery Recycling Initiative (LABRI) aims to prevent lead poisoning by curbing informal, unsafe recycling of used lead-acid batteries (ULABs) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Unsafe ULAB recycling is a major source of toxic lead exposure for children and communities, killing ~350,000 people and costing LMICs $170 billion in lost productivity each year.

Countries like Brazil and South Africa have managed to reduce illegal recycling by adopting policies that increase the viability of regulated, safe recycling practices. We think these policies could be well-suited to the Philippines, a country with a large lead-acid battery market.

At scale, we estimate our work could avert a DALY equivalent for $25.

Why are you qualified to work on this?

We are a cofounder team of two, with experience in public health NGO strategy, policy development, regulatory analysis, and government engagement.

Micaella is an economist with a background in economic policy advisory and sustainable development consulting in LMICs. She holds a Master’s degree in African Studies from the University of Oxford and undergraduate degrees in Economics and Statistics from the University of Cape Town. Her Master’s thesis focused on energy development policy evaluation in South Africa.

Tom is a commercial lawyer by training, with experience at a leading law firm in the UK, the Bank of England, and as Chief of Staff at the GiveWell-funded NGO Fortify Health. He holds a postgraduate degree in Law from the University of Law and an undergraduate degree in History from the University of Cambridge. Tom has drafted regulations, advised senior policymakers, and led stakeholder engagement on complex topics.

Unsafe ULAB recycling is fundamentally a market problem. We believe that our combined experience of government engagement, market regulation and economic analysis prepares us well to address this challenge.

What would you do if not funded?

LABRI has received seed funding from anonymous, one-off donors that was sufficient to cover our initial scoping and our base costs (i.e., co-founder salaries) for 12 months. However, we require further funding to support the local hiring and primary data collection that we believe is necessary to initiate government engagement in the Philippines.

Without ACXG funding, we would likely seek funding from Effective Altruist or Effective Altruist-adjacent funders, including individuals within the EA community and Open Philanthropy.

How much money do you need?

With $30,000, LABRI would be able to launch our government engagement efforts in the Philippines and deliver policy-relevant research. This would include hiring a full-time Filipino team member to coordinate our engagements with policymakers, partnering with a local university to conduct environmental testing, and two additional trips for both co-founders to the Philippines. This level of funding would cover the direct costs of the project, but would not cover our salaries.

With $50,000, we could cover our salaries and extend our operational runway by three months. This additional runway would allow us to dedicate an additional 3-month period entirely to our programme (engaging government stakeholders, advancing policy proposals, and coordinating allies) rather than diverting time to securing future funding.

With $100,000, we could further invest in a few high-leverage, but more expensive, activities to achieve policy change in the Philippines. Our planned budget for work in the Philippines covers the costs of government engagement and some small-scale research projects. However, there are other opportunities which could meaningfully accelerate policy change and increase the likelihood of success. There are three particular projects we would be excited about right now:

Local pilot - support a local government unit to implement a small-scale deposit scheme. This would both provide a good ‘test case’ that we could use to iron out difficulties of implementation and demonstrate feasibility.
Digital monitoring - work with a private company to monitor the journey of a few used lead-acid batteries through the recycling supply chain. This would provide us with valuable context while also helping us to test models for monitoring eventual national policy.
External experts - contract several reputable Philippine experts to advise us and attend meetings with us, including a lawyer, a health academic and an industry expert. We already have suitable contacts that we think could fulfill a few of these roles.

We currently think there’s about a 40% likelihood that our policy outcome will be achieved by December 2026, and that conducting these activities would increase that likelihood by about 10 percentage points (to ~50%).

Supporting documents

A synthesis of the literature on the health effects of lead exposure: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z9qAsqJxoH-JYyyzmtHNHPLdPV1zy1AUkNXw9RLpozE/edit?usp=sharing

A case study on the risks of lead-acid battery recycling: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/epdf/10.1289/ehp.0900696

A Substack post by Hugo Smith reviewing the policies of Brazil:

https://leadbatteries.substack.com/p/how-brazil-solved-its-lead-acid-battery