The Mexicans are smarter than many other groups. When hey allow the construction of a hazardous business - be it dealing with lead or LPG, they do not allow homes to be built anywhere near the plant. Some of the older LPG plants located miles outside of a city down here have scattered nearby homes but newer plants are extremely remote.
Americans allow homes to be built up against a new plant's fence, then impose incredibly strict bureaucratic regulations casing the cost of a manufactured product to swell by 25%. I'm not referring to vital restrictions of Pb contamination, but horrendous amounts of paperwork that serve to do nothing but increase the size of government.
When Mark Daugherty, president of Ramcar, battery showed me the amount of paperwork needed to keep the EPA off his back I gasped. Eighty percent of the paperwork was "redundancy incorporated". Same reporting, different format to different government departments.
When I had poured a "containment slab" with trough and overlayed it with gray epoxy paint, I had no less than 4 US and California agencies, demand personal inspections, and I had to fill out tens of dozens of pages of paperwork and send them to various bureaucratic entities. And this was back in the eighties. I purchased an "overkill" MSA breathing mask for Armando. PVC gauntlet up to the elbows gloves, Lexan goggles and hard toed boots. The EPA raised a fit because the Mine Safety Equipment breathing apparatus did not appear on their list for approved devices. Hell no. It cost ten times as much as was EPA approved for lead miners. The bruhaha cost me many hundreds of dollars but I "won". Armando and I went to the doctor twice a year and had lead and antimony blood analysis done at my expense.
The USA government needs to be overhauled. Then perhaps our superior engineering and production ability can provide us with competitively priced batteries. And intelligence rather than bureaucracy will ensure our safety.
Concorde Lifeline batteries are expensive. All USA made AGM batteries are expensive. Show me a foreign AGM battery as good as a USA manufactured battery.