Here are 5 of LA’s worst, costliest and surprising lead-contaminated sites

Among the hundreds of lead-polluted sites dotted across L.A. County, a disproportionate number are located in largely low-income neighborhoods of color. Too often, lead pollution is left in place, even when it’s severe enough to cause health harm, with potential long-term implications for those living there like irreversible neurological damage.

If it’s not dug up and hauled away or removed by some other biological means, it can stay in the environment for millenia.

Below are five lead-contaminated sites across L.A. County that illustrate just how pervasive and intractable this problem can be, how costly it is to clean up, and how surprising some of the sources are.

1. Ecobat Resources California

The Ecobat Resources California lead-acid battery recycling plant in the City of Industry.

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Karla Gachet

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Ecobat Resources California in the City of Industry is the only lead battery recycling plant left operating this side of the Rockies. It opened in 1959 (under the company name Quemetco), when the world of environmental regulations was more akin to the Wild West.

In 2008, the plant installed a sophisticated air filter that helped reduce lead emissions markedly. But by then, the plant had already released huge quantities of lead into the surrounding environment, carried by the wind before settling over people’s homes.

A long history of hazardous waste violations spanning decades also show Ecobat has not been as careful as it should in managing the dangerous chemicals it processes.

Multiple rounds of soil lead testing have been conducted around the plant since the early 1990s, and as recently as 2021. In 2024, DTSC ordered the company to do yet more testing to define the full extent of their pollution footprint.

That’s because “every single time they’ve gone out to sample in the community, they’ve got a non-trivial portion of the samples collected showing elevated levels of lead,” said Angela Johnson Meszaros, a senior attorney with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice.

The nearest homes are just hundreds of feet from the plant perimeter, but state officials estimate it could have polluted soils up to 1.6 miles away. Yet, no government agency has ever cleaned up these lead–contaminated homes.

Though DTSC has linked the plant’s operations to this off-site contamination, Ecobat Resources California leadership and other industry representatives have voiced reservations about a potential cleanup, arguing the plant shouldn’t be responsible for removing pollution that might have come from other potential sources like lead paint and gasoline.

Community members and environmental advocates are worried that, when time comes to close the plant and clean up its mess (something not currently on the cards), there won’t be enough money given the scale of the possible remediation.

In Ecobat’s latest hazardous waste operating permit issued in 2025, the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, or DTSC, required the company to post more than $50 million in financial assurances to cover all the cleanup costs if the plant were to close, and for any ongoing environmental monitoring of the site after that.

The number is way too small, warned Johnson Meszaros. “This amount is at best, a baseless hope about the extent of the contamination that has left the facility,” she said. “And at worst, it’s a tragic mistake.”

2. S&W Atlas Iron and Metals

Loud ground-shaking activity within S&W Atlas Iron would often disrupt classes at Jordan High school.

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Courtesy of LAUSD

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For years, S&W Atlas Iron and Metals, a scrap metal recycling plant in Watts, contaminated the neighboring Jordan High campus with toxins like lead, made the lives of students and teachers unbearable with loud ground-shaking noises, and terrorized them with multiple explosions that rained shrapnel onto school grounds. The school and the plant were separated by a single wall.

Last year, Matthew and Gary Weisenberg, the owner operators of Atlas, pleaded no contest in the Los Angeles County Superior Court to five felony counts related to the management of hazardous substances including lead, and were ordered to clean up the toxic mess they’ve left behind.

The problem isn’t over. Cancer-causing chemicals in the soil are crawling toward and onto the campus of Jordan High that court filings describe as “orders of magnitude” above state screening levels.

“Let’s call it what it is, a form of societal violence and a human rights violation,” said Jane Williams, executive director of the environmental advocacy group California Communities Against Toxics, who has tracked this case for decades.

The Weisenbergs’ two-year probationary clock runs out in October 2027.

But many in the Jordan High community have voiced frustration that the Weisenbergs are dragging their heels on this ongoing remediation, and that state regulators aren’t being tough enough, especially given how the students are already in one of the most pollution-burdened communities in the whole state.

“What I want to see is the DTSC and CalEPA really look holistically at the cumulative risks at this site and that they really start to address not just one contaminant individually but all the of the factors that are weighing on the Watts community at any given time,” said Thelmy Alvarez, who helped found the environmental justice collaborative Better Watts Initiative and who worked for years to close down Atlas.

3. Exide Technologies

Large water pipes are shown in the foreground inside the now-demolished Exide Technologies plant.

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Alfredo Santana

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LA Public Press

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For three decades, the former Exide lead battery recycling plant in the City of Vernon spewed some 3,500 tons of lead into surrounding neighborhoods until the federal government forced it to close in 2015. So far, the state has overseen the removal of lead-contaminated soil in more than 6,300 homes up to 1.7 miles around the plant. The massive cleanup is the largest hazardous waste cleanup in the state’s history.

A federal bankruptcy court released Exide Technologies from its cleanup obligations in October 2020, the company having stumped up only about $23.3 million toward those costs. This is a fraction of the nearly $950 million state taxpayers have so far forked out for the cleanup.

Major question marks remain about just how well those public funds have been used.

The nonprofit advocacy group East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice partnered with UC Irvine researchers to collect soil samples from 373 homes that had already been cleaned up. Earlier this year, they published their findings.

They found that 70 percent of these supposedly remediated homes yielded samples that still exceeded the state’s health protective soil lead threshold.

The department has been conducting its own confirmation testing on 623 properties that were previously cleaned up between mid-April 2025 and February.

The individual sampling reports and raw data have been released in batches since June. A comprehensive report on these results will be available early next year, according to DTSC spokesperson Elizabeth Leslie-Gassaway.

4. Central Metals

The now shuttered Central Metals facility in South LA, captured here in July 2025.

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Dan Ross

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Long Beach Post

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When the huge front gates used to open to Central Metals, a recycler in South Los Angeles, the neighbors who lived right across the road got a glimpse into a vast metal wasteland full of junk piles.

Those who lived in the noisy shadow of this bustling 11-acre compound, where scrap would be cut and shredded, long feared it had polluted their homes and backyards with lead.

Their fears were heightened in 2011, when the state found hazardous waste leaks from smashed battery cases at the plant, along with oily sludge and broken e-waste.

Company documents detailed 430 tons of onsite soil laced with lead and other chemicals. Regulators determined toxic dust had likely blown into the adjacent community. It was closed in 2016.

Two years later, the EPA began an investigation into lead pollution surrounding Central Metals to determine whether to include the site on the federal Superfund list.

Among the agency’s eventual findings, 11 of the 83 homes sampled had soil lead levels high enough to warrant remediation, but not significant enough, the EPA argued, to make Central Metals a Superfund site.

To help decide whether Central Metals should join the Superfund list, the EPA used a soil lead cleanup threshold of 400 parts per million (ppm).

Since that report was published, the EPA has halved its residential soil lead screening limit to 200 ppm. Using that threshold, nearly 25% of the EPA’s samples in the report were over that threshold.

If the EPA used California’s stricter residential soil lead screening limit of 80 ppm, however, a staggering 88% of its published samples would exceed that threshold, according to an LA Public Press review of the data.

Mason Thomas Reid, a researcher at Ohio State University and UCLA’s JAYLab, taking soil lead readings with an XRF gun at a home around the former Central Metals plant in July 2025.

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Dan Ross

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LA Public Press

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This matches the results of a more recent independent soil lead study at homes around Central Metals, where 86% of the samples were also above California’s 80 ppm cleanup threshold.

Both the EPA and the DTSC told LA Public Press they have no plans to remediate these homes. The only cleanup has been within the recycler’s walls.

In explaining DTSC’s position, agency spokesperson Leslie-Gassaway wrote in an email how the EPA had already found no “correlation” between the residential lead contamination and Central Metals.

“As a result, DTSC is not directing Central Metals to perform soil lead remediation near its facility,” wrote spokesperson Leslie-Gassaway.

But the independent researchers found that the higher lead levels in the homes “correlated significantly” with closer proximity to Central Metals.

Either way, “no matter who put it there, the people are still suffering as a result of exposure to all of this contamination, and that’s something that should be addressed,” said Mason Thomas Reid, a researcher at Ohio State University and UCLA’s JAYLab who helped conduct the study with key support from the non-profit Communities for a Better Environment.

5. Santa Monica Airport

Santa Monica Airport is scheduled to be closed down in 2028 after decades of community pushback, including over emission risks from leaded aviation fuels.

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Dan Ross

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LA Public Press

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While a complete ban on the sale of leaded gas for highway vehicles was finally achieved in 1996, the little piston engine planes criss-crossing L.A.’s skies are still using leaded fuel, which rains out over the world below.

In total, these planes constitute the largest lead emitter in the nation.

The EPA is also phasing out the use of leaded aviation gasoline. The goal is for this to be achieved by 2030.

In the meantime, the more than 200,000 such planes that use this fuel have access to multiple county, municipal and private airports across LA. One of those airports is in Santa Monica.

Regulatory air quality studies published in 2010 and  2011 found the highest lead levels occurred closest to the Santa Monica runways before tapering off and returning to normal levels 1 kilometer away, and that air contaminants spiked just before and after planes took off.

Around that same time, the EPA found elevated soil lead levels in two of five tested homes close to the airport, though not in limited soil and dust samples at the airport and neighboring parks.

With significantly greater lead emissions than Santa Monica is Van Nuys Airport in the San Fernando Valley. Indeed, Van Nuys ranks as one of the largest lead emitting airports nationwide. An extensive 2025 report found that residents living in the shadow of the Van Nuys Airport attributed health conditions to noise and air pollution stemming from the airport.

Their concerns are far from unfounded.

The EPA determined in 2023 that leaded aviation gasoline is a likely danger to “public health and welfare.” This 2016 study identified higher rates of respiratory problems, heart disease, and emergency room visits among those living around California’s 12 largest airports.

Overall research on lead impacts around all L.A. County’s airports remains slim, however, though the South Coast Air Quality Management District conducted air monitoring around the Whiteman Airport in Pacoima in 2018, 2019, and in 2022. It found air lead levels to be within typical ranges, and lower than a national air quality standard for the chemical.

At the same time, a 2021 study around Reid-Hillview Airport in Northern California’s Santa Clara County found that the closer children lived to the airport, the higher the amount of lead in their blood.

A subsequent analysis around the same airport found that childhood blood lead levels increased with the greater volume of air traffic and larger quantities of leaded aviation gas sold.

Santa Monica airport is set to close in 2028 after years of community pushback, including around the risks from exposures to this nasty neurotoxin.

This article was produced by the nonprofit journalism publication LA Public Press. It is co-published here with permission.

This is part three of “Lead City,” our series documenting the impact of lead pollution across L.A. County. You can read the first and second stories here. The series was produced as part of the USC Center for Health Journalism’s California Health Equity Fellowship.