https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Elementa...
It is cheaper to extract and process lead but that is not what is suggested by the headline
However here the news is about indium, which is one of the rarest chemical elements and for which alternatives are needed for most uses as its reserves are insufficient.
In the Solar System, indium is less abundant than gold. In Earth's crust indium is enriched, but it still remains only about as abundant as silver.
The right strategy with toxic elements like lead, mercury, cadmium and thallium is not to forbid their use.
The real goal is to forbid their release back into the environment after their extraction.
It is impossible to avoid their extraction because in mines they are mixed with other very desirable elements. If they are not separated, because the mine owners cannot sell them, they remain in mining waste, causing a pollution much more severe than from any industrial products.
So if the use of such elements would be completely forbidden, the only method to make it really work would be if the governments would buy all the quantities of such elements that result as byproducts of mining operations and they would store them in safe places.
Because these toxic elements can nonetheless be very useful for certain purposes, a more rational alternative to just store them is to allow their use for various applications, conditioned by a license that should be granted only if the applicant convincingly demonstrates that the toxic element will not be released from the product during its lifetime and that there exists a recycling process that can recover the element from the product at a certain efficiency, e.g. 95% (and the selling price should include the recycling cost, possibly also a deposit refundable on return to a recycling center, to guarantee that the products are not dumped randomly at end of life).