Where does lead come from?

Lead is the only major metal for which the mine table is the smaller half of the story. On this page lead production means mined lead measured by its metal content, unless refined or secondary lead is named. World refined lead output is roughly three times world mine output, because recycled batteries supply the difference. In 2025 China mined 1.9 million tonnes, 42% of the world's 4.5 million tonnes of mined lead (USGS MCS). Australia was second at 11%, then Peru at 6.4%, United States at 6.2% and Russia at 5.8%. Countries outside the 12 listed separately accounted for 14%, and world mine output changed -2% from the previous year.

That mine ranking understates supply, and the gap is the central fact of the lead market. Most of the world's refined lead is secondary, recovered from spent lead-acid batteries: the International Lead and Zinc Study Group puts secondary production at between 55% and 65% of refined output over the years from 2005 to 2022, and above 60% every year since 2016 (ILZSG, World Lead Factbook 2023). In the United States the figure is effectively all of it, because the country has had no primary lead refinery since 2013. Lead is the most recycled metal in general use because its main product is a heavy, standardized, valuable object that is collected at the point of replacement: a car battery is worth taking back. So a chart of mine production describes where the ore is, while a chart of refined production describes where the scrap is, and the two are only loosely connected.

Where lead is mined, it is almost never mined alone. Galena, the lead sulfide, forms alongside sphalerite in the same sediment-hosted beds that make zinc deposits, so Mount Isa, McArthur River, Broken Hill, Red Dog and the Peruvian and Chinese polymetallic districts appear on both lists. Carbonate-hosted deposits of the Mississippi Valley type give the higher-grade, lead-dominant mines of southeast Missouri. Silver rides with lead in most of these ores, and silver credits often decide whether a lead mine is worth operating.

Reserves, the part of identified deposits that could be mined economically at the time of the estimate, stood at 95 million tonnes in 2025, with Australia holding 36%, China 23% and Russia 9.4% (USGS MCS). Because so much demand is met by recycling, reserve life means less for lead than for other metals: the working stock of lead already in circulation, most of it in batteries, is turned over every few years and returned to smelters.

Two flows matter. Concentrate (HS 2607) moves from mines to primary smelters; in 2024 Mexico was the largest exporter with 18% of a trade worth $6.1 billion, ahead of United States and Russia, while China took 37% and South Korea 27% of imports (CEPII BACI). Refined lead (HS 7801) is the finished metal. In 2024 India led exports of unwrought lead (HS 7801) with 10% of the world's $8.7 billion, followed by South Korea and Australia, and India was the largest importer at 11%.

A third flow is harder to see. Used lead-acid batteries and battery scrap are traded internationally as hazardous waste, and their movement is controlled under the Basel Convention, which restricts exports to countries that cannot handle them safely. Because the material is bulky, dirty and regulated, most recycling happens close to where the batteries were used, which is why refined lead output tracks vehicle fleets and telecom infrastructure more closely than it tracks orebodies. Countries that export refined lead often do so because they host large secondary smelters, not large mines, and a country can be a substantial exporter of metal with almost no mine production at all.

The benchmark is the London Metal Exchange lead contract, ticker PB, traded in 25 t lots quoted in US$/t and settled by delivery of refined lead of at least 99.97% purity into an LME warehouse. There is a cash price for delivery in two days and a three-month price, and the spread between them shows whether nearby metal is tight. The Shanghai Futures Exchange lists a yuan contract, and it quotes primary and secondary lead separately, which is unusual and reflects how much of Chinese supply comes from recycling. Physical buyers pay the exchange price plus a regional premium.

The series charted here is LME cash. In August 2026 it averaged $1,855/t, down 5% from a year earlier (World Bank Pink Sheet). The highest monthly average was $3,720/t in October 2007; adjusted for US inflation the real high was $6,005/t in June 1979, and the lowest monthly average since the series began in 1960 was $141/t in August 1962. Lead trades in a narrower range than the other base metals, because recycled supply expands quickly when prices rise and contracts when they fall, which damps both ends of the cycle.

Two different pricing mechanisms sit under that single quote. Primary smelters buy concentrate at the exchange value of the contained lead minus a treatment charge, negotiated annually and traded spot, with credits for silver and gold and penalties for impurities; those charges are the primary smelter's margin and move with concentrate availability. Secondary smelters buy scrap batteries at a discount to the exchange price that has to cover collection, breaking, smelting, refining and the cost of managing the acid and the plastic. The scrap discount is the real driver of refined supply: when it is wide, recyclers run hard and refined metal is plentiful; when battery scrap gets scarce or environmental compliance gets dearer, the discount narrows, recyclers idle and the metal market tightens even though no mine has changed its plan.

Secondary smelters compete for a limited flow of spent batteries, and the price they must pay relative to the exchange quote decides whether they run. Because battery returns depend on how many were sold three to five years earlier rather than on today's metal price, the supply of scrap is close to fixed in the short run. A surge in recycler capacity therefore bids up scrap and squeezes margins, and a wave of closures does the opposite, so refined supply swings on collection economics rather than on mining.

Most lead demand is replacement batteries for vehicles already on the road, not batteries for new ones, which makes it unusually steady. Every combustion car, and almost every battery-electric car too, carries a low-voltage lead-acid battery for starting, lighting and electronics, and it is replaced every few years. Cold winters kill weak batteries and lift demand; mild ones defer it. The size and age of the fleet in China, India, the United States and Europe therefore matters more than new vehicle sales.

Lead is a neurotoxin, and the rules governing emissions, worker blood-lead levels, soil contamination and waste disposal are among the strictest applied to any metal. Enforcement campaigns close small secondary smelters, particularly in China and South Asia, and compliance costs have closed primary smelters in high-income countries outright. Each tightening removes refining capacity faster than it removes demand, so regulation is a supply-side driver, and the location of refining has shifted accordingly.

Lead-acid batteries are cheap, recyclable and tolerant of abuse, but they are heavy and store little energy for their weight. Lithium-ion has taken most of the market for forklifts, telecom backup and grid storage, and it competes for the low-voltage automotive slot as well. Against that, start-stop systems and the growing electrical load in vehicles have raised the size and specification of the batteries that remain. The net effect is slow and structural rather than cyclical.

Because lead comes out of the same mines as zinc and silver, lead concentrate supply is decided by prices the lead market does not set. A wave of zinc mine closures cuts lead concentrate supply as a side effect; a zinc expansion adds lead nobody asked for. This is why primary lead output can move sharply while lead demand is flat, and why the treatment charges paid to primary lead smelters often move in step with those in zinc.

Lead's visible inventory is small relative to consumption, so deliveries into and out of exchange warehouses move the spreads sharply. Metal is also stored off-warrant, outside the exchange system, which means reported stocks can jump when off-market metal is warranted rather than because anything real has changed. Traders watch the cash-to-three-month spread and the concentration of warrant holdings for signs that a dominant position is squeezing nearby delivery dates.

Used batteries are regulated as hazardous waste, so their movement across borders is licensed and sometimes barred. Tighter enforcement of the Basel Convention, national import bans and customs scrutiny redirect scrap toward domestic recyclers and away from cheaper informal processing abroad. That raises the cost of recycled lead in some regions and lowers it in others, which shows up as regional premium differences and as shifts in where refined metal is produced rather than as a change in world supply.

The primary route starts with galena, mined underground with sphalerite and silver minerals. The ore is crushed, ground and floated in stages to give a lead concentrate that typically runs well above half lead by weight, plus separate zinc and sometimes copper concentrates. The concentrate is sintered or roasted to convert sulfide to oxide and capture sulfur as sulfuric acid, then reduced with coke in a blast furnace or a direct smelting furnace to produce lead bullion. Bullion is refined either pyrometallurgically, by successive drossing steps that remove copper, arsenic, antimony, tin, silver and bismuth, or electrolytically. The silver recovered at this stage is a large share of world silver supply and often worth more than the lead.

The secondary route is shorter and cheaper, which is why it dominates. Spent batteries are broken in a hammer mill and separated into three streams: metallic grids and terminals, lead paste, which is a mixture of lead oxide and lead sulfate, and polypropylene cases; the sulfuric acid is drained and either neutralized or recovered as sodium sulfate. The paste is desulfurized and then reduced in a rotary or reverberatory furnace with coke and fluxes, and the resulting bullion is refined and alloyed with antimony, calcium or tin to the specification the battery maker wants. The plastic is washed and pelletized into new cases. A modern plant recovers almost all the lead that enters it.

The two routes make chemically identical metal but face different constraints. A primary smelter is tied to concentrate supply, sulfur capture and a long refining train; a secondary smelter is tied to a collection network, to furnace emissions control and to the disposal of slag that carries lead and other metals. Because the secondary route is so much less capital-intensive, capacity can be added quickly, which is one reason lead prices spend long stretches near the cost of recycling.

Batteries are the market. The International Lead and Zinc Study Group put lead-acid batteries at 86% of world refined lead use in 2022, ahead of rolled and extruded products at 7% and lead compounds at 5%, with the battery share reaching 92% in China and the United States (ILZSG, World Lead Factbook 2023). Automotive starting, lighting and ignition batteries are the largest single application, with industrial batteries for backup power, forklifts and grid support behind them. The chemistry has barely changed in a century and a half: lead and lead dioxide plates in sulfuric acid, delivering a high burst of current at low cost and surviving deep cold. Every combustion vehicle carries one, and so does almost every electric vehicle, which still needs a low-voltage battery for its electronics.

Everything else is a remainder. Lead sheet is used for roofing, flashing and radiation shielding in hospitals and laboratories, where its density stops X-rays and gamma rays. Lead alloys go into cable sheathing, solders, bearings and ammunition. Lead compounds still appear in some specialist glass, ceramics and pigments, and lead-zirconate-titanate is the standard piezoelectric material in sensors and actuators. The historic uses that made lead notorious have been legislated away: leaded gasoline, lead paint, lead water pipes and lead solder in food cans have all been phased out across most of the world.

Refining sits close to consumption rather than close to ore. Because more than half of refined supply comes from batteries collected locally, the map of lead refining follows vehicle fleets: China, the United States, India, South Korea and Europe. Primary smelting is a smaller and shrinking business concentrated in China, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Australia, Mexico and a handful of European plants; several high-income countries have closed their last primary smelter and now run entirely on secondary metal. That is why India led exports of refined lead in 2024 at 10% of world export value (CEPII BACI) while ranking well down the mine table.

Concentrate still moves long distances. It leaves Australia through Townsville and Port Pirie, Peru through Callao, Mexico through Manzanillo and the Missouri mines through Gulf ports, mostly bound for smelters in China and South Korea, which together take a large share of world concentrate imports (CEPII BACI). LME warehouses in Asia and Europe hold the deliverable stocks, and the small size of those stocks relative to consumption makes the spreads volatile.

The single points of failure are unusual for a metal. One is regulatory: a smelter can lose its license over emissions or blood-lead findings and never reopen, and the loss of one large primary plant can remove a country's entire primary capacity. Another is the collection network, which depends on scrapyards, garages and informal collectors; when scrap prices fall, batteries pile up uncollected and refined supply drops months later. A third is the acid market, because primary smelting produces sulfuric acid that must be sold or neutralized, so a weak acid market raises the cost of running a smelter. Finally, a handful of polymetallic mines carry a large share of concentrate, and their decisions are driven by zinc and silver, not by lead.