Data on publicly reported fire incidents indicate a new, more dangerous standard for North American waste and recycling facility operators.
The June fire report from Ryan Fogelman, who works as a fire prevention consultant at Fire Rover, shows there were 40 incidents in May at facilities in the United States and Canada. That’s six fewer than the average number of May incidents over the previous decade.
Of note, he said the number of combined events at waste, paper and plastics facilities accounted for only about 38% of all incidents, while 45% of May’s events happened at metal recycling yards; those percentages are typically flipped. That’s “a notable anomaly worth tracking as we move into the traditionally higher-risk summer months,” he said.
May’s fires bring the 2026 total to 114. That’s a pace that’s below those of 2024 (430 incidents) and 2025 (448), but it remains well above the pace of previous years, when the annual average was 360.
“The important takeaway is that while 2026 is running below the record pace established in 2024 and 2025, it is not a return to historical norms,” Fogelman said. “The industry has settled into a new, elevated baseline.”
Also of note, the year has seen 55 incidents so far at scrap metal facilities. That 35.5% share is well above the typical industry norm of 32%. Fogelman suggested this could be because when upstream battery contamination and processing volumes increase, metals facilities are among the first to feel the impact.
“The scrap metal industry is facing a fundamentally different fire risk environment than it did a decade ago,” he said. “Lithium-ion batteries, embedded electronics, vapes, power tools, electric vehicle components and increasingly complex material streams are finding their way into scrap operations every day.”
That matters because of how different facilities operate. A metal facility may have a fire start in a shredder, for example, which creates a far different incident profile than one that starts in part of a recycling operation. Given the ignition characteristics, suppression requirements and other differences, Fogelman said facilities in growing risk categories should re-evaluate whether their fire-protection infrastructure meets modern material processing demands.
For metal facilities and others across the industry, the numbers confirm that the risk isn’t going away, Fogelman said. That should shift some focus away from outright prevention and toward mitigation — stopping fires from becoming catastrophic.
“The question is no longer whether fires will occur,” he said. “The question is how well-prepared your facility is to manage risk before the next one does.”
Incidents included in the report are publicly reported and are assumed to be two-alarm fires or greater. Last year’s fires caused more than $2.5 billion in cumulative damage.
