Products

Lead

From car batteries to x-ray rooms

Lead is a soft, ductile metal that resists both oxygen and acids. It also has high electrical conductivity. This makes it extremely important for the automotive industry, which buys around 80 per cent of all lead to produce for use in car batteries. Lead also has qualities that allow it to protect against ionizing radiation and x-rays. Walls and ceilings in hospital x-ray rooms are therefore covered with lead, and thanks to its high density, lead is used in the keels of sailing boats.

We produce primary lead, i.e. extracted from our own mines, and secondary lead recovered from dead batteries. We extract pure lead from lead concentrates at our smelting plant in Rönnskär and make lead ingots. The lead concentrates come from our own mines and external suppliers.

We recover lead from around 4 million dead car batteries every year at the Bergsöe smelting plant, and we process around 70,000 tonnes of used lead-acid batteries.

Chemical symbol: Pb
Appearance: Bluish white
Melting point: 327.52 °C
Boiling point: 1,740 °C

more than 95 per cent of the batteries that contain lead are recycled today? Lead is also used as a backup power source where operational reliability standards are high, e.g. in hospitals.

Lead mines:
Tara
Garpenberg
Bolidenområdet

Lead smelters:
Bergsöe
Rönnskär