Publicly reported fires at MRFs and transfer stations increased by 20% in 2024 over the prior year, according to an annual review by fire detection equipment supplier Fire Rover. It’s the highest yearly figure since the company began tracking fire statistics.
The MRF and transfer station increase came alongside a wider industry spike: Across all waste and recycling facility categories, publicly reported fires in the U.S. and Canada jumped 15% from 373 in 2023 to 430 in 2024.
The MRF and transfer station category represented over half of all publicly reported fires in the recycling sector last year, which Fire Rover noted is not a surprise. Not only do these facilities have a lot of flammable material, like OCC and mixed paper, but they are “traditional channels for other improperly disposed hazards, such as lithium-ion batteries, chemicals, gasoline and propane tanks, that carry additional fire risk,” the company wrote in its report.
FireRover, which launched in 2015, provides a remote fire detection and extinguishing system geared for the recycling industry. It is currently employed in 750 locations across three continents and is outfitted in about 5% of U.S. MRFs, Ryan Fogelman, the company’s vice president of fire protection services, said in a March 11 presentation on the report.
MRF fires have been a growing concern over the last decade, with a MRF operator as early as 2018 describing improperly disposed of lithium-ion batteries – the primary cause of many facility fires – as an “existential threat” for the municipal recycling world.
Lithium-ion batteries are often improperly dropped in curbside recycling carts, and during transportation to the MRF or on the tip floor itself, they can get jostled or punctured to the point that they go into “thermal runaway.” That’s the industry term for the residual energy inside the batteries causing heat and potential fire.
The 2024 increase came after a decline in 2023, which seemed to be evidence that a major industry focus on fire prevention strategies was proving effective. Recent years have brought blunt discussions of the damage MRFs can face, labeling regulations at the state level, outreach strategies to teach proper battery disposal, best practices from experts, robotics and X-ray equipment for battery detection and the wider adoption of the Fire Rover system.
“I thought, years ago when I started doing this, that we would have an initial lithium-ion battery wave, and I thought that we were going to be able to get a handle on this problem with just the Fire Rover solution,” Fogelman said. “I was wrong: Fires are increasing.”
The report is not a comprehensive database of fires, because no such information source exists. Sometimes fires aren’t reported to anyone because they’re put out quickly; sometimes a fire department responds but no public notice is made. The Fire Rover report solely focuses on fires that generated media coverage or were otherwise publicly reported in some way.
That means the reported information in each fire varies, so the cause isn’t always clear. But Fogelman offered one theory on why fires are increasing in the MRF and transfer station sector: disposable vaping devices. These nicotine or THC delivery devices contain lithium-ion batteries and, in the U.S., have few options for proper disposal, Fogelman explained. He added they are often considered biohazards because of the nicotine or THC juice inside.
“In the United States, we literally have almost no drop-off points for this,” he said.
The report added that “not only are their batteries being improperly discarded in waste and recycling bins, but the vape industry has done the bare minimum to invest in the technology needed to address the 1.2 billion vapes entering our waste and recycling streams annually. With little to no safe disposal options available, this problem is only expected to worsen.”
Recycling facility fires have become inextricably linked with lithium-ion batteries, but it’s important to remember that wider list of threats as well, including propane tanks, pressurized aerosols and others.
“Just because lithium-ion batteries are causing a compounding of the risk, that doesn’t mean that the traditional hazards that have been around for 70 years have disappeared,” Fogelman said.
A version of this story appeared in Resource Recycling on Mar. 18.
