Well, they can't bill you for cleaning up what they don't know you have. The price mentioned above is the same for pure lead on
rotometals for pure lead.
They'll even ship free if you buy enough. I only use pure lead (and rarely that) for diluting other alloys that have too much of something else in them, or as sheet for shielding my fusor (that was bought at a junkyard for $0.30/lb - it used to be popular for flashing/plumbing sewage systems).
Not a bad idea to have some, but pure lead is too soft for all but a few uses. You can make decent .38 spcl or .45 ACP bullets with a few percent tin added to get good molds, that's about it, for high pressure loads you need to look at the various "hardball" alloys, with antimony (much nastier than lead, from a human point of view - acts like arsenic on we biological things). I use about 3 different alloys here for various things. Linotype for rifle bullets with a gas check, medium hardball for higher pressure handgun loads, and a softer lead-tin alloy for lower pressure loads. They get slightly mixed up in reclaiming them, but not enough to matter much - and that's why I also have plenty of lead, tin, antimony etc to "fix up" a slightly wrong mix. What you "shoot for" there is to have the right hardness so the pressure just barely "upsets" the lead to a perfect fit to the barrel during firing, but no more. You can only go so far with that - alloy it too hard and it becomes brittle, which is no good for either accuracy or terminal effect, which is why jacketed bullets are the norm for hunting now - you can make them faster and do what you want when they hit the target better.
Lead itself won't jump up and bite you. Some of what I have sat out in the weather for almost a century, and only gained a thin coat of lead oxide - now, that IS bad for you, so cleaning it is a chore and you have to do it right so as not to breathe that stuff. This is actually better for shielding detectors than new-smelted lead, which still is a little radioactive - all lead is from radioactive decay, it's one of the products of that we worry about the least, normally. You can even tell which thing decayed into your lead (if it's virgin and not mixed with 10 other sources), as the different original sources leave different lead isotopes as the stable thing at the end of the decay chain(!).
I expect all "real" assets like this to go up re fiat. Some more than others, but this is one that has pretty good prospects - and being dense, isn't hard to store up a lot of in lbs. We'd like to use less as a society, but no one has come up with a decent alternative for car batteries yet, and a number of other uses. Yes, there are "more advanced" battery technologies out there, but they are a lot pickier about everything from temperature to precise charge/discharge cycles. They won't be taking the place of car batteries, gel cells in alarm system etc anytime soon - cost much much more and less reliable over time. You don't see NiMH or Li-ion cells lasting 20 years on float/standby, but you do lead-acid batteries.
I knew CA *tried* to ban lead in all ammo, but my friend Dianne Bishop of Bishop ammo makes lead ammo and the police buy it - in CA (where she is), and everywhere else, and she is simply swamped with demand for it. She is running 4 Dillon Super-1050's on two shifts 7 days a week to make the stuff, and has actually worn a couple of those out. Considering that 20k rounds through my smaller Dillon RL-550b barely has it broken in...that's a lotta ammo, and yes, it's lead inside, though usually jacketed up to the hollow point at least.
Various bans on lead in
shotgun ammo for bird hunting are in effect all over, however, and it's not all a bad thing. The birds really do get that stuff picked up out of the lake bottoms in search of stuff to fill their gizzards, and that's a bad place for lead to be - you can make a good case for not using it for that (or eating those birds). Regular ammo? Nah. Not enough pounds to worry about, it doesn't get inside animals unless a hunter is lucky...just not as much of it as those nut cases that empty 100+ rounds of shotgun shells in duck season either. (One 12 ga shotgun load is several rifle or handgun bullets worth as well)
Pure not what you want for bullet casting, though it is often used inside jacketed/swaged bullets.
A little tin (more expensive) is required to get a decent mold fill. Even for muzzle loaders, they use a few percent tin (and rotometals sells that too, or already alloyed for you).
Lead mining has useful byproducts too - like bismuth, tin, *silver* etc...as ancona says, most metals do, and if there is enough of a profitable side product (or it's cheaper to refine and sell than hazmat remediate) then it is treated like that.
The goal of almost every large operation these days is to have zero waste stream - sell everything that comes in the door back to someone (or burn the waste as the paper mills do, for process heat). This is why we don't have a good rare earth metal supply here - no one wants the thorium it always comes mixed with - yet.
Edit - ancona, next time you do a hospital rad room, keep me in mind. I've got a lot of lead, but that lead glass...man is that stuff ever expensive, and it's useful here so I don't need to use remote cameras to see the fusor - the Mark 1 eyeball is much better.