"We, the American public have been blindsided again by the Obama crowd!!!" warns a chain . "Last Lead smelting plant -- gone."
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The goes on to blame the "Evil Protection Agency" for shutting down a lead smelting plant, calling it "backdoor gun control" and saying it will result in the cost of bullets soaring.
"All lead for bullets will have to come from overseas!" the says, adding, "Long term what this means: Your investment in ammo may be your best investment. Guns will be plentiful but ammo will be another story. How does $3.75 a round (that's for one bullet) for a 9mm work for you? Box of 50 would only cost you $187.50."
We wondered: Is the correct to say that all lead for bullets will now have to come from overseas?
The Doe Run plant
We&#;ve been down this road before.
In December, former Republican U.S. Rep. Allen West of South Florida, stated on his website: "It seems that back door gun control is in full effect in the United States. Why? Thanks to Obama&#;s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), we can no longer smelt lead from ore in the United States. ... So America, back door gun control is moving forward and while we are all distracted with Obamacare and Iran nuclear negotiations, our Second Amendment rights are undergoing an assault by clandestine infiltration."
We rated West&#;s claim Pants on Fire.
The shuttered smelter, operated by Doe Run, is located in Herculaneum, Mo. Facing regulatory concerns about its air-quality record, Doe Run announced in that it had reached a settlement with the EPA and the state of Missouri which included paying fines. Then, in December , it shut down. We found no evidence that the EPA&#;s settlement had anything to do with gun control -- it was about pollution.
Ever since the EPA was created in , one of its missions has been to limit pollution from smelters, which are "terribly toxic sites," said David Rosner, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University who studies the politics of pollution, told us when we wrote fact-checked West. Lead can accumulate in the body from many sources, and it can severely hamper mental and physical development.
"It had nothing to do with gun control or bullets," Rosner told PolitiFact. "The idea of linking this to an issue of gun control or a surreptitious way for the government trying to shut down the gun industry is nuts. This was an EPA decision because of children who were being poisoned by what had come out of that plant."
Indeed, while the chain blames Obama, the EPA&#;s case against Doe Run actually began decades ago. The St. Louis area failed to meet federal clean air standards for lead in due to emissions from the smelter, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in . That was during the Reagan administration.
Reagan wasn't the only Republican president who presided over an advance in the national anti-lead effort. In , during the tenure of President George W. Bush, the EPA adopted tougher air quality standards for lead that were 10 times more stringent than the past.
Doe Run&#;s primary smelter -- a plant that extracts lead from ore -- was the last primary smelter in the country. But Doe Run continues to operate as a secondary lead smelter -- essentially a recycler for lead contained in other products. That includes -- you guessed it -- bullets.
A company spokeswoman told us in December that more than 80 percent of all lead produced in the United States is used in either vehicle batteries or in stationary batteries for backup power used by the military and in telecommunications and medical applications.
"In the U.S., the recycle rate of these batteries is approximately 98 percent, making lead-based batteries the most highly recycled consumer product," the company said in a statement. "These batteries are recycled at secondary lead smelters. We own such a smelter in southern Missouri."
In our previous fact check, Doe Run spokeswoman Tammy Stankey told us that the company "will continue to supply our ammo customers using secondary lead."
We contacted Stankey again for this fact-check.
"The primary smelter did close, (but) we are still supplying ammo customers through our only secondary smelter," she told us. "We do know that primary lead is being imported to the U.S., but we don&#;t know if it is specific to ammunition suppliers. ... There are many other uses of lead."
Ammunition experts
Now that the Doe Run primary smelter has been shuttered for a few months, we checked back with ammunition experts to see whether there&#;s any evidence that all lead for bullets now comes from overseas.
An NRA spokesman referred us to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Spokesman Mike Bazinet told us for this fact-check that "almost all the lead used in ammunition in the U.S. comes from secondary sources, recycled car batteries and other sources of lead. The closing of the lead smelter has not had any effect on ammunition prices or availability. ... Lead for bullets comes from secondary sources, and that was not completely understood by people out there. We certainly tried explain that it's had virtually no effect on ammunition prices."
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While some ammunition is imported to the U.S. from overseas, "it would be pretty heavy stuff to send (lead) across the ocean and put into a bullet. There are secondary sources of lead in sufficient quantity in the United States."
Tom Falone -- president of Clearwater-based Florida Bullet, which supplies ammunition to law-enforcement agencies in Florida -- said its manufacturer has been using reclaimed lead for years.
"I think that by the time we see a shortage, the industry will have found another material to replace the lead with," Falone said.
Our ruling
A chain said that following closure of a lead smelter in Missouri, "all lead for bullets will have to come from overseas!"
While the closure of a Doe Run primary lead smelter in December means there are no smelters to make lead from ore anywhere in the United States, smelters to recycle lead remain in operation, and their output is substantial enough to satisfy the needs of ammunition manufacturers. Four months after that particular smelter closed, we found no evidence that all lead for bullets now comes from overseas.
We rate the claim Pants on Fire.
Yesterday, five environmental groups&#;Sierra Club, California Communities Against Toxics, Frisco Unleaded, the Missouri Coalition for the Environment Foundation, and the Natural Resources Defense Council&#;represented by the public interest law firm Earthjustice, filed an intervention to defend and strengthen Environmental Protection Agency rules requiring secondary lead smelters to clean up toxic air pollution.
Secondary lead smelters, often known as battery recyclers, extract and process lead from scrap material and old batteries, exposing communities to lead, cadmium, arsenic and other toxic air pollutants. Many smelters continue to use outdated technology and pump thousands of pounds of lead a year into neighboring communities. At the same time, simple enclosure of smelter facilities and available air pollution control equipment, such as wet electrostatic precipitators and high efficiency filters, can drastically reduce lead pollution and prevent harm to neighboring children.
&#;Because the science shows that there is no safe level of exposure to lead, smelters must use existing technology to cut their emissions of lead and other toxic air pollution,&#; said Emma Cheuse, attorney with Earthjustice. &#;It is essential for the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up the air for the people most affected, including children and local residents living near lead smelters who are disproportionately people of color and people living below the poverty line.&#;
The environmental groups intend to oppose industry groups&#; efforts to weaken the final rule and also filed their own legal challenge to try to ensure that affected communities get the full health protection they need. Lead is a persistent pollutant that builds up in the environment and is particularly dangerous for children. Exposure to lead in the air and other environmental sources can cause neurological harm to brain function and learning disabilities in children, and also is associated with impairment of the cardiovascular, reproductive, kidney, and immune system for adults.
&#;We do not have to sacrifice the environment and take on more health risks to preserve or increase jobs, because protection for clean air is a good investment in our health and our economy,&#; said Michael Mullen, member of the Sierra Club in Troy, Ala. &#;All of us who live in communities where there are secondary lead smelters need to make sure they install the best available technology to protect our health and our environment from lead pollution.&#;
&#;We have evidence that facilities can dramatically reduce their pollution by totally enclosing their operations and using modern air pollution controls,&#; said Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics. &#;Children especially need protection from lead pollution in their earliest years, when exposure is quite dangerous. It is a matter of basic fairness that all Americans must have the best protection from toxic air pollution available, and that&#;s why it&#;s so vital for the EPA to have strong national air standards.&#;
&#;Pollution controls are available and already in use at some facilities,&#; said Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, staff scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. &#;There&#;s no excuse for this industry to keep poisoning communities. The EPA needs to ensure that all children have the opportunity to grow up safe and healthy by limiting lead pollution.&#;
&#;Lead is highly toxic and causes irreversible damage to the brains of young children,&#; said Shiby Mathew, co-chair of Frisco Unleaded. &#;Children are particularly vulnerable to lead pollution because normal play activities bring them in greater contact with lead contamination and their nervous systems are still developing.&#;
&#;Of 16 total facilities in the nation, two are in Missouri, with one pumping over 13 thousand pounds of lead into our air annually, or more than 100 times the amount of lead emitted by a source in California,&#; said Kathleen Logan Smith, executive director of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment. &#;Our children and our environment should not be the dumping grounds for this toxic air pollution. We deserve the same equal protection from smelters achieved in other states, and that&#;s why we need stronger national air standards now.&#;
The EPA issued the revised rule as a result of a settlement Sierra Club and Earthjustice reached with the EPA in requiring the EPA to review and revise regulations for toxic air pollution from over two dozen major industrial sources, including lead smelters. This settlement set deadlines for the EPA to engage in rulemaking required by the Clean Air Act, but it did not address the substance of the final rule. The final rule that the EPA issued represents an improvement over the prior standards, but does not lower emissions of lead to the extent necessary to provide an &#;ample margin of safety to protect public health&#; as the Clean Air Act requires, and does not match the lead reductions achieved by the best-performing sources in the industry. The groups also filed a petition for reconsideration to urge the EPA to engage in further rulemaking to strengthen the final rule.
This recent legal action is being taken amid a current push from the EPA&#;s Children&#;s Health Protection Advisory Committee and the Center for Disease Control Advisory Committee Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention to strengthen federal measures to lessen children&#;s exposure to lead based on the best available current science.
In a letter dated March 26, CHPAC wrote to Administrator Lisa Jackson noting that the EPA itself has recognized that there is &#;no &#;safe&#; level of exposure&#; to lead. The EPA has banned lead in gasoline but exposure continues to occur from lead smelting, coal burning, older plumbing fixtures, paint in buildings, and aviation fuel, among other sources. In a January 4 report, the CDC Committee recommended revising the way lead exposure is treated because of &#;a growing body of scientific literature that adverse health effects may arise from blood lead levels lower than 10 μg/dL&#; and emphasized &#;the need to prevent children from being exposed to lead before their blood lead levels can become elevated.&#;
There are currently 15 secondary lead smelters located in Pennsylvania, Florida, Minnesota, California, Indiana, New York, Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri, Texas, and Puerto Rico. Another new facility is scheduled to open this year in South Carolina.
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