The process begins with pieces of scrap metal - mainly automotive parts such as transmission housings, radiators, wheels and body panels - piled high in the yard outside the workshop.
Piece by piece, they are melted down into bars in a dilapidated furnace that belches thick black smoke into the air above the factory in Ghor province in central Afghanistan.
The workers here have little more than scarves to protect themselves from the pollution, and many don't even have gloves to wear as they carry crucibles of molten metal to the waiting molds.
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Firooz Ahmad has been working at the factory for eight years, spending ten hours a day at his workstation, where he shapes the cast aluminum bodies into the pressure cookers that virtually every Afghan family uses to prepare their daily meals.
The 39-year-old has no idea that he is slowly being poisoned by the metal cooking pots, called kazans, that he makes every day.
"Is it dangerous?" he asks when asked if he's concerned about lead poisoning.
"I suffer from headaches and persistent pain in my joints and sometimes I have difficulty breathing - maybe I've been poisoned!" he says, laughing.
He's not alone. Afghanistan has the highest levels of lead exposure in the world, with average blood lead levels nearly three times higher than those in nearby India and nearly five times higher than those in China, according to the best available data.
A growing body of evidence suggests that kazans and other low-quality recycled aluminum cooking pots could be the culprit. The ubiquitous pots are often given as wedding gifts and can be found in every corner of the country.
In recent years, researchers have been trying to figure out why they found such high blood lead levels in Afghan refugee children arriving in the United States.
In 2022, researchers in Washington state examined and "simulated" dozens of imported aluminum and stainless steel cooking pots [the] "cooking and preserving" food.
They found that every piece of aluminum cookware donated by Afghan refugee families exceeded the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's maximum limit for lead intake through food.
The biggest offenders were the Kazans, one of whom 'leached enough lead to exceed the child limit by 650 times'.
In contrast, no stainless steel pressure cooker was found to exceed safety standards.
Shortly after the report was published, several U.S. states issued health advisories warning of the dangers of Afghan pressure cookers. And earlier this year, Washington became the first U.S. state to ban the manufacture, sale, or distribution of lead-contaminated cookware.
It seems that news of the danger the Kazans pose to Afghanistan has not reached them.
According to The Telegraph, there was a covert effort under the US-backed government of Hamid Karzai to draw attention to lead-contaminated cooking appliances, but that effort came to an end when he lost power in 2014.
A decade later, no Taliban health ministry official The Telegraph spoke to was aware of the problem or of plans to address it.
However, if left unchecked, the consequences for Afghanistan could be serious and long-lasting.
Lead poisoning is responsible for approximately five and a half million premature deaths worldwide each year and is a major cause of global disease burden due to the long-term harms it causes, including increased risk of high blood pressure and kidney damage in later life.
According to the World Health Organization, there is no safe level of exposure. An estimated 800 million children worldwide are infected, including nearly all children in Afghanistan.
The harmful effects that heavy metals can have on health are especially serious for young children and mothers.
Lead accumulates in the body over time and is stored in the teeth and bones.
High exposure levels can cause serious damage to the brain and central nervous system, leading to convulsions, comas and even death.
Even in small doses, lead can cause serious learning disabilities. It has also been linked to higher rates of violence and crime in adults.
"The evidence is that lead poisoning damages children's cognitive development," said Dr Alice Evans, senior lecturer in developmental social sciences at King's College London.
"It's not like you're having a sick day, so to speak, but rather it affects how the brain develops, and the way that economists have been able to show this is that children who suffer from it make worse progress at school," she told The Telegraph. "They're more likely to be suspended and it seems that they're more likely to be associated with violent crime."
The sudden drop in crime in the industrialized world, and particularly in America in the 1990s, has been attributed to the removal of lead from paint and gasoline.
While some scientists remain skeptical of a causal link between lead and crime rates - the lead-crime hypothesis - the correlation between declining lead levels in the blood of young children and violent crime is startling, as this graph shows:
There are more success stories.
Recently, researchers in Bangladesh managed to identify turmeric, enriched with vibrant yellow lead chromate, as a major contributor to the sky-high blood lead levels they found.
The discovery prompted the country's Food Safety Authority to launch a highly successful two-pronged campaign, warning the public about the dangers of contaminated spices and patrolling markets with X-ray fluorescence analyzers to detect lead.
According to Rachel Bonnifield, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Global Development, it is harder to blame Afghanistan's problem on a single culprit, such as the Kazans.
Countries that have suffered from decades of conflict, such as Afghanistan, also tend to have much higher levels of lead in the environment, she said, adding that kohl, or surma - the traditional eyeliner that many Afghans wear from a very young age - has also been identified as a potential source.
The antimony from which it is usually made is often mistaken for galena (lead sulfide) and is therefore found together with galena.
More broadly, understanding the true scale of the lead poisoning problem in Afghanistan is complicated by the lack of data, she said. But what is clear is the severity of the impact it can have.
"The implications of lead poisoning for global health, for children's education, and for overall development and economic growth are, quite frankly, staggering," she told a recent conference.
The Telegraph confronted the owner of a Kazan factory with the potential danger of his products.
Enayat, owner of a factory that produces cooking pots in the western province of Herat, said he had heard "rumors" of lead poisoning.
"These are just rumours," he told The Telegraph. "We now have European customers and our competitors are spreading these false rumours about poisoning."
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"I've been in this business for 20 years and I've never seen a case like this," he said, adding that in his factory they only use "pure aluminum" to make their pots.
Convincing Afghans of the dangers of lead poisoning can also be a difficult task.
Mr Ahmad, the craftsman from Ghor who earns about £4 a day, said he and his colleagues had only one priority.
"Here for us it is all about bread and how we can fill our stomachs, that is the challenge and nothing else," he said.
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