Q4 2025 Newsletter
- Micaella Rogers
- Nov 20, 2025
- 4 min read
Message from Co-Founders
We are extremely excited to share our first newsletter with you. We started the Lead-Acid Battery Recycling Initiative (LABRI) in April and we are hugely grateful for the advice, time and resources that countless people have provided us with over this time. These newsletters are our way to keep you in the loop as we work to combat childhood lead exposure now and in the years to come.
The last nine months or so have been a whirlwind. We conducted our scoping visit to the Philippines and a follow-up visit to build our understanding of the market and establish relationships with government, industry and civil society organisations. We’ll soon be on-boarding our first member of staff in the Philippines, a Policy Officer. We are also currently working with civil society and industry partners to prepare a draft policy recommendation to reduce unsafe ULAB recycling in the Philippines.
As always, we would love to hear from you. If you have any feedback, ideas, questions, or just comments about our work, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Many thanks, Micaella and Tom
Recap: What does LABRI do?
LABRI is an NGO dedicated to addressing childhood lead poisoning.
Lead poisoning has major health and economic consequences, causing almost 3.5 million deaths and more than USD 950 million in lost productivity every year (Global Burden of Disease, 2023; Attina and Trasande, 2013).
Unsafe lead-acid battery recycling is a major driver of lead poisoning. One unsafe lead-acid battery recycling site can affect the learning and development of children up to 6 km away (Berkhout et al., 2025). An individual city can have hundreds of these unsafe sites.
Informal ULAB recycling is a market failure, but there are market-based mechanisms to address it. A growing number of countries have reduced or prevented informal, unsafe recycling through market-based policies like refundable deposit schemes and tax exemptions for compliant recyclers. Market-based policies in Brazil more than halved informal recycling (WEF, 2020).
LABRI works with governments to develop and adopt these policies. We support research to understand local markets and then work with governments and industry to design market-based policies that will reduce and prevent informal, unsafe ULAB recycling.
Working in the Philippines
After we co-founded LABRI, we conducted a geographic assessment of potential countries of operation, prioritising by problem size, market suitability and policy landscape. We identified through desktop research and interviews with Philippine policy organisations that informal ULAB recycling was likely a problem in the Philippines and that the government might be open to addressing it. We therefore decided to conduct a scoping visit in the Philippines.
Visit 1: June and July 2025
We conducted a scoping visit to the Philippines in June / July, with the primary aim of assessing the problem of ULAB recycling and understanding the policy landscape. During the visit, we conducted market research and met with director-level officials in the Philippines government and academic, NGOs and think tanks working on environmental health and economic policy-making.
We concluded from this visit that informal recycling of ULABs is a significant problem in the Philippines. We also feel positive about the prospects of supporting government and civil society partners to adopt appropriate solutions to this issue. You can read more about this first visit in a blog post that we shared on Hugo Smith’s substack.
Visit 2: September and October
We conducted a second visit to the Philippines in September and October to seek feedback from stakeholders on our initial policy ideas. We were able to meet with a wide range of government, industry and civil society contacts during the visit. We also discussed potential partnerships to co-develop policy proposals with influential stakeholders that we have since been negotiating; we hope to finalise those partnerships in the coming weeks.
Other activities
Market research in Malawi and Tanzania
We collaborated with the Global Health Progress Hub and research assistants in Malawi and Tanzania to scope informal recycling hotspots in these countries. We planned to use this research to evaluate whether to begin work in either Malawi or Tanzania, in addition to the Philippines. We concluded from this market research that our work to reduce unsafe, ULAB recycling could be impactful in Malawi, but was less likely to be so in Tanzania (where informal smelting of ULABs appears to be much less prevalent).
We are very grateful to our research assistants, Abdulrahman Banisheyba in Tanzania and Grace Mswero in Malawi, for their dedication and ingenuity in conducting this research.
Washington D.C.
Finally, Tom attended the Centre for Global Development’s inaugural Lead Research Conference in Washington D.C. in June. The conference was a strong reminder of the impact of ULAB recycling on children’s health and potential globally, with presentations outlining the extensive harm that poor recycling can cause. Tom also attended the Global Development Incubator’s ActionLab on ULAB recycling, which allowed us to learn more about ongoing work in relation to ULABs and develop plans to address the issue.
Looking ahead
We are soon onboarding our first full-time member of staff, a Policy Officer in the Philippines. The officer will drive forward our engagement efforts with government stakeholders and help us to devise a strategy to end lead poisoning from unsafe recycling.
We are conducting environmental sampling. We plan to conduct an environmental contamination study around ULAB sites to encourage policymakers to act, in collaboration with a prominent Philippine university.
