Electronics recycling facility fires have fluctuated widely over the years, but 2024 brought a new high, according to one tally. | PK Studio/Shutterstock
There were 14 publicly reported fires at North American electronics recycling facilities in 2024, representing a 56% increase 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 e-scrap facility 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.
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, including at about 5% of U.S. materials recovery facilities, Ryan Fogelman, the company’s vice president of fire protection services, said in a March 11 presentation on the report.
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.
E-scrap fires have fluctuated widely since Fire Rover began keeping track in 2016. They hovered around four per year before climbing to seven in 2019 and 12 in 2020, the previous high. They fell back to five in 2021 and four in 2022, before rising again in 2023 and 2024.
Materials recovery facility fires have drawn significant public attention because they can often be catastrophic – fires igniting on a tip floor full of paper products can quickly get out of control. And they are by far the most common type of recycling facility fire, representing over 50% of all recycling fires in 2024, Fire Rover found.
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.
They’re also a major concern for the e-scrap industry, generating regulatory proposals and skyrocketing insurance costs. And although e-scrap facilities might seem like a more natural fit for batteries than a materials recovery facility, they pose significant problems during device processing. As the U.S. EPA laid out in a 2021 report, “electronics recyclers are set up to process electronics, not energy storage devices, but now often receive products containing (lithium-ion batteries).”
At e-scrap facilities, workers typically remove the batteries from devices prior to processing – a process that has its own dangers – but battery removal can be difficult in some products, including laptops, cell phones and headphones, and batteries can sometimes be missed. In that case, they can cause problems during downstream device shredding or other processing.
The Fire Rover report is largely based on information gleaned from news coverage, 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.”
A version of this story appeared in Resource Recycling on Mar. 18.