The Exide Technologies facility in Vernon reclaimed lead from used batteries—melting them down to extract the metal for resale. The process produces significant quantities of lead dust, arsenic, and other heavy metals that disperse into the air and settle on soil. The facility had been operating under various ownership structures since the mid-twentieth century.

Exide's operations were subject to regulatory oversight, but that oversight was persistently inadequate. The company received repeated violations over the years for exceeding permitted emissions levels. The communities of Boyle Heights and Maywood—where more than 90 percent of residents identified as Latino—bore the environmental consequences.

Lead is a neurotoxin with no safe exposure level in children. Even small amounts can cause permanent cognitive damage, behavioral problems, and developmental delays. Blood lead testing in children living near the Exide facility found elevated levels at rates significantly above the regional average.

When state and federal regulators conducted soil testing around the facility, they found lead contamination across a far larger area than had been publicly acknowledged. The final assessment identified approximately 10,000 properties within a contamination zone affecting an estimated 100,000 people. The boundaries of that zone mapped almost exactly onto the boundaries of working-class Latino neighborhoods in the southeast industrial corridor of Los Angeles.

In March 2015, Exide Technologies reached an agreement with California regulators to close the Vernon facility permanently in exchange for avoiding criminal prosecution for environmental crimes. The company agreed to pay $50 million toward cleanup.

Fifty million dollars proved to be a fraction of what was needed. By 2023, the state of California had spent more than $336 million cleaning up approximately 4,400 properties—removing contaminated soil from yards, replacing it with clean fill, and replanting. Thousands more properties remained in the queue. Experts described the project as the largest environmental cleanup of residential soil contamination in California history.

The homeowners who had unknowingly planted gardens in contaminated soil, the children who had played in contaminated yards—none of them were compensated by Exide directly. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2020.

The Exide case became a touchstone for environmental justice advocates in California. The pattern it exemplified—heavy industry sited in communities of color, regulatory failures compounding over decades, cleanup costs borne by taxpayers while profits accrued to shareholders—is not unique to Vernon or to Los Angeles.

The California legislature subsequently strengthened the state's environmental justice protections, requiring greater scrutiny of industrial facilities proposed in communities already bearing disproportionate pollution burdens. Whether those protections are sufficient is still debated. The families of Boyle Heights and Maywood are still waiting for their neighborhoods to be fully cleaned up.