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To see the toxic legacy of lead mining in the US and understand the complicated task of cleaning it up, all one has to do is look at Richard Rankin’s backyard in Missouri.
The septic system of his home in Fenton was filled in more than 20 years ago with lead-contaminated soil from a site near a smelter, later threatening the son he adopted in 2014. His son, who was repeatedly tested for elevated lead levels in his blood, couldn’t play in the backyard and Rankin couldn’t sell the home until it was cleaned up.
But the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t start work to remove the lead until 2019. The EPA’s contractors botched the soil remediation and septic system replacement, forcing Rankin and his family to move to a temporary home in 2022. It was only last summer that the Rankins were able to return.
Once you’re notified of high lead levels, “you’re stuck,” said Rankin, who works in construction. “I am now obligated to disclose that if I try to sell my home.” For now, he’s relieved that he can host his large family when they visit, “because the house is wonderful, not because of what the EPA did.”
Rankin’s home is one of more than 8,400 residential properties in southeastern Missouri, some built atop mine waste, that have undergone EPA lead remediation. The agency has spent $127 million since 2020 on remediating mine waste and removing lead-contaminated soil from yards in the Superfund sites in southeast Missouri’s Old Lead Belt.
Under guidelines the Biden administration adopted a year ago, over 10,000 more properties qualify for the clean-up work, according to EPA Region 7 spokesman Kellen Ashford. Ashford said Rankin’s experience with remediation, which the homeowner called “a nightmare,” was an outlier.
Lead, which often remains in soil until it’s removed or washes away, is linked to lowered IQ, nervous system damage, learning disabilities and other developmental problems in children.
In adults it can cause high blood pressure, nerve and reproductive system disorders and other health problems. Lead is also toxic to migratory birds and aquatic species.
The EPA’s lead cleanup in Missouri continued through the first Trump administration, but it’s unclear how President-elect Donald Trump will approach it in his second term. Contamination in southeastern Missouri is likely to threaten residents for decades because of the time it will take to clear the land and water of lead. And the state’s few remaining lead mines are expanding to meet demand mainly from overseas.
The lead in Rankin’s yard is connected to a smelter in Herculaneum, Missouri. The smelter closed in 2013 after its owner, Doe Run Resources Corp., spent $65 million as part of a legal settlement with the Justice Department. Doe Run’s mining, milling, and smelting facilities racked up numerous air, water and hazardous waste management violations in southeastern Missouri.
Though modern lead mining practices are less toxic than those of the past, federal agencies have documented contamination near the state’s last active mines, harming birds and endangered species. But most of the contamination is in areas mining companies abandoned decades ago. The EPA over the last 33 years has designated seven Superfund sites in this area, some of them spanning entire counties.
“We have hundreds of miles of contaminated rivers,” with lead levels in sediment high enough to harm songbirds and aquatic species, including crayfish and endangered mussels, said Leslie Lueckenhoff, a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who focuses on the ecological damages of contamination. When rivers in the region flood, the lead-laden soil washes over yards, potentially poisoning children who live there.
Doe Run CEO Matthew Wohl said the company treats 30 million gallons of water a day that it discharges into local waterways, flushing out some of the existing pollution.
“We’re doing the best we can to make sure there’s the least amount of negative impact on the environment as possible,” Wohl said.
Though the EPA says there’s no safe level of lead exposure for anyone, especially children, the threat to many Missourians is as normal and commonplace as the soil itself, and many seem resigned to it.
For example, St. Joe State Park, south of St. Louis, turned a mine waste pile into off-highway vehicle trails with signs warning visitors that they should avoid the area if they worry about lead exposure.
Old lead mine and mill tailings ponds, which are filled with submerged mine waste, have attracted residents interested in building a home near a “lake,” even though the lead exposure potential is high, Ashford said.
“You hear about it and accept it over time, right?” said Bob Menees, a staff attorney at the Great Rivers Environmental Law Center in St. Louis, who kayaks in several rivers flowing through the Old Lead Belt. “Literally that whole area is contaminated with lead.”
In many cases, the damage is permanent.
“It is technologically impracticable to clean up heavy metals contaminating groundwater aquifers,” said Robert Abney, environmental program supervisor for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. “Residents of some localities are forced to dig their new wells into a deeper aquifer that is not contaminated, which makes these wells tougher to afford.”
Though lead contamination in the region is widespread and well documented, data gaps prevent health officials from showing exactly how it’s affecting human health in Missouri and beyond. Most states don’t require or even conduct comprehensive lead testing in children.
Though lead contamination in the region is widespread and well documented, data gaps prevent health officials from showing exactly how it’s affecting human health
Research from Gabe Filippelli, director of the Center for Urban Health at Indiana University — part of a citizen-lead project in which residents send him soil samples — shows that several cities across the US have extremely high lead levels in their soils, potentially threatening kids. Chicago leads the list with the highest, but no Missouri city or town is included in the study because nobody there sent him soil samples to analyze.
Most kids aren’t routinely tested for elevated blood lead levels, so existing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data — none of which is more recent than from 2021 — only reflect those who actually took a test. There is no data on adult lead exposure. The CDC didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“We don’t even test kids who are most at risk,” said Tom Neltner, an attorney and director of Unleaded Kids, a nonprofit group focused on lead removal. “We only test the youngest kids. We don’t test pregnant women. I don’t think the data’s going to be out there because we don’t look.”
Lead is even inside the guts of some homes in Missouri. Lead mine and mill waste was used as construction material in the town of Viburnum, which was built by St. Joe Minerals Corp., a company that became Doe Run in 1994.
“These mining and milling wastes often contain residual lead concentrations of concern to human health and the environment,” and the company is in the process of cleaning up properties where lead material was used for construction, Ashford said.
Local health officials in Missouri say their data suggest the local risk is high.
In Jefferson County, where Doe Run’s lead smelter contaminated yards in Herculaneum before it shut down, health officials say the risk of lead exposure is acute. Of the 191 kids under seven years old who were tested for lead in their blood in 2023, 111 had elevated levels, said Briane Zwiener, public information officer for the Jefferson County Health Department.
The EPA is planning to cap residual soil contamination with pavement and monitor contaminated groundwater in the area so the smelter site can be redeveloped. The agency expects to publish the proposed plan soon, Ashford said.
Contamination from today’s mining practices is much lower than from the older mines that shuttered because mine waste is stored in ponds, and dust control measures have prevented residue from spreading.
But lead’s toxic legacy lives on. Local health officials say their primary concern is mine workers bringing lead dust home on their clothes.
“They’re some of the best-paying jobs in the area,” said Zachary Moser, director of the Dent County Public Health Center in Salem, Missouri, where many mine workers live. But workers might not fully understand the dangers, Moser said.
A consent decree that the Justice Department obtained in September against oil giant BP America Inc. is a window into the industry’s ongoing ecological harms in the Viburnum Trend mining belt in the Ozarks southwest of St. Louis.
The decree ordered BP to pay about $877,000 plus interest to restore soils and streams around the Sweetwater Mine which were polluted decades ago by a lead mining company BP purchased in the 1980s, before Doe Run took over the mine. BP declined to comment.
It’s a relatively small fine for a multi-billion-dollar company, but the decree painted a stark picture of the damage: Lead discharges from Sweetwater harmed numerous animal species, polluted groundwater and contaminated “hundreds of acres” of soils in the area.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and other state and federal agencies in the area are restoring some of the ecological damage in the region, and the agency had expected to finalize plans to continue the restoration by the end of 2024, but a final plan has not been released. (Lee Zeldin, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the EPA, didn’t respond to requests for comment about his approach to lead regulation.)
The EPA considers many of the streams around the mines in the Viburnum Trend impaired. Inside, the mines gush with water, and Doe Run’s Wohl said the water flushed out of the corridors and then purified in the company’s water treatment plants is less polluted than the water naturally flowing into them.
But Doe Run’s environmental record has been challenged in court. The company faces legal action filed by more than 1,400 plaintiffs in Peru who claim that lead contamination from the company’s smelter there harmed their health.
Doe Run posted “Now Hiring” signs at the Sweetwater Mine’s entrance this summer. It’s one of three Viburnum Trend mines that were approved for expansion by the Biden administration in 2023. All of the lead produced from the underground mines in the Viburnum Trend is exported to Asia and Europe for processing and is mainly used for large lead-acid batteries, some of which are used in Asian electric vehicles. The Battery Council International, a trade group, is promoting research on advanced lead-acid battery technology for use in electric vehicles and energy storage.
Wohl said he sees domestic demand for lead increasing alongside demand for electric vehicle batteries and batteries for utility-scale electricity storage for renewable energy. Doe Run is researching ways to return lead processing to the US through a more environmentally friendly method that it hopes to commercialize in the next few years if lead prices rise and if the company finds a way to process the cobalt and nickel that are byproducts of lead mining, he said.
In a scenario in which countries focus heavily on adopting electric vehicles, BloombergNEF projects that demand for lead for clean technologies would sharply increase through the rest of the decade before falling to nearly zero in the mid-2030s, according to an October transition metals report.
The US was the world’s third largest lead producer in 2023 behind China and Australia, producing an estimated 270,000 metric tons of lead, about the same as Mexico, according to US Geological Survey data. Lead production has been flat since 2019, and prices have trended flat for more than a decade.
While Doe Run is planning its future, its history of contamination throughout southeastern Missouri lives on for local residents like Rankin, whose lives have been upended by efforts to remediate polluted yards.
The long clean-up process forced him to pay for the maintenance of a house he couldn’t live in — expenses that the EPA would not reimburse — and prevented him from refinancing his home when mortgage rates were much lower.
Rankin said government agencies aren’t doing enough to prevent the spread of lead in Missouri. “Our biggest frustration here was the lack of respect and concern for our home, our property, and our lives in this process,” he said.
(By Bobby Magill)
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