Fires at waste management facilities are on the rise. According to the National Fire Chiefs Council, the UK Fire and Rescue service attend roughly 300 significant fires at waste management sites every year.
As some of these fires tend to burn for days on end, it is more than likely that for every day in a calendar year a waste fire is either starting, continuing to burn or being extinguished.
These fires that pose a significant risk to the recycling and management sector happen year-round but have a tendency to increase in the summer months when waste is drier and more items such as camping gas or BBQ ashes are being discarded in a careless way.
However, it may come as very little surprise, the biggest culprits of dangerous waste fires are “zombie batteries” typically found in everyday items such as disposable vapes or other small waste electrical electronic equipment. Disposable vapes have exponentially grown in popularity over the last few years. This growth in consumption of vapes is far outpacing the know-how of disposing of them in a safe and appropriate fashion.
Th Environmental Services Association (ESA) recently commissioned a national YouGov poll of more than 2,000 adults which confirmed this alongside a lack of awareness on how to dispose of other dangerous flammable items. The poll found that the majority of those asked said they were not confident they knew how to safely dispose of used vape devices, compressed gas canisters (including patio gas and nitrous oxide), lighter fuel, fireworks or old petrol.
Claimed confidence levels about safe disposal methods were higher for items such as batteries, aerosols and barbeque ashes, although the poll also found that nearly a fifth of people admitted to binning batteries (19 percent) and aerosols (18 percent) at least once in the past year, while nearly 8 percent of respondents admitted to putting vape devices in their general waste bin, which was a similar figure for cigarette lighters too.
From a list of domestic flammable or explosive items, the poll findings suggest that batteries, aerosols, vapes and cigarette lighters were the most-binned by householders over the past year, despite efforts by the industry, local authorities and media to warn the public of the dangers of doing so.
Based off these findings, the ESA launched a campaign that FCC Environment fully supports warning the public not to cause a “bincident” and to be mindful about what they put in their bin or recycling this summer. The campaign urges householders to instead take flammable or explosive items to their local household waste recycling centre or check with their local council about which service to use.
Fires at waste management facilities can have significant negative impacts and their risk seemingly grows greater every year as small, high-risk items such as disposable vapes become ever more popular. FCC Environment joins the ESA in encouraging people to be more careful and to dispose of potentially flammable waste safely.
