On Wednesday I linked to a post at Commander Zero's place, discussing the safe disposal of used bear spray canisters. In my own post, I said:
According to one garbage disposal company in Tennessee whom I had dealings with over another matter, one of the biggest problems is that fires sometimes start in garbage dumps - quite spontaneously, due to sunlight reflected and concentrated through a piece of broken glass, or chemicals mixing and combusting, or old ashes that were not completely extinguished causing a delayed fire reaction. If a partially filled spray can of almost anything is too near those fires, it can (and occasionally does) explode. Complications ensue, particularly if that makes the fire worse.
As if to echo my words, I came across this article at Ars Technica.
2024 was "a year of growth," according to fire-suppression company Fire Rover, but that's not an entirely good thing.
The company ... releases annual reports on waste and recycling facility fires in the US and Canada to select industry and media. In 2024, Fire Rover, based on its fire identifications, saw 2,910 incidents, a 60 percent increase from the 1,809 in 2023, and more than double the 1,409 fires confirmed in 2022.
Publicly reported fire incidents at waste and recycling facilities also hit 398, a new high since Fire Rover began compiling its report eight years ago, when that number was closer to 275.
Lots of things could cause fires in the waste stream, long before lithium-ion batteries became common: "Fireworks, pool chemicals, hot (barbecue) briquettes," writes Ryan Fogelman, partner and vice president of early fire protection in Fire Rover, in an email to Ars. But lithium-ion batteries pose a growing problem, as the number of devices with batteries increases, consumer education and disposal choices remain limited, and batteries remain a very easy-to-miss, troublesome occupant of the waste stream.
All batteries that make it into waste streams are potentially hazardous, as they have so many ways of being set off: puncturing, vibration, overheating, short-circuiting, crushing, internal cell failure, overcharging, or inherent manufacturing flaws, among others. Fire Rover's report notes that the media often portrays batteries as "spontaneously" catching fire. In reality, the very nature of waste handling makes it almost impossible to ensure that no battery will face hazards in handling, the report notes. Tiny batteries can be packed into the most disposable of items—even paper marketing materials handed out at conferences.
Fogelman estimates, based on his experience and some assumptions, that about half of the fires he's tracking originate with batteries. Roughly $2.5 billion of loss to facilities and infrastructure came from fires last year, divided between traditional hazards and batteries, he writes.
There's more at the link.
Two and a half billion dollars of loss incurred in just one year due to fires at waste disposal and reprocessing facilities? That's a very big expense to bear . . . and is undoubtedly one of the reasons waste disposal fees are getting steadily higher.
Intrigued, I called our local garbage dump, which caters for waste from several nearby towns and cities in addition to our own. The person on the other end sighed a long-suffering sigh, and said that they expect at least one fire every week at the dump, and frequently get two, three or more over the same period. He agreed with Ars Technica's thesis that lithium batteries probably cause a good half of those fires, with the rest caused by other dangerous waste. He was a little heated when discussing people who throw away half-filled paint cans, bottles of chemical solvents, etc. inside garbage bags containing standard household waste, where they can't be easily identified before being crushed or otherwise damaged during the handling process. They burn very well, apparently! The company has to provide special training (and ongoing refresher training) to its staff to help them cope with the problem, because unexpected combustion can present a serious hazard to their health.
Perhaps we (including me!) should think more about what we're throwing away before we casually toss such garbage into our bins. I know I've been guilty of some of the things he complained about. I'll try to do better in future.
Peter
16 comments:
One of my sons is a firefighter. He says dump fires are especially enjoyable. They burn as long as the fuel lasts and have a nasty habit of reigniting
I like to shoot empty spray cans with an air rifle before disposal.
How many people know that Home Depot accepts power tool batteries? In fact, I've taken lithium cells there too. I don't know the full range of batteries they accept - I take lead-acid batteries to O'Reilly Auto Parts.
For me, chemical waste presents a more difficult challenge. Neighboring / nearby jurisdictions have disposal programs, but not mine. Brake fluid is a challenge, for example, which I find odd, since the service industry surely has that capability. So is anti-freeze.
- jed
My husband also shoots any aerosol cans, before disposing in the recycling landfill or garbage dump.
SouthernNH
A long-standing issue with trash is products that produce heat as they break down. Another is incompatible materials mixing.
For example, I know people who start their bonfires by mixing brake fluid and sodium permanganate - it's an intense hypergolic reaction.
I'm surprised that companies are not more ready for this since it's impossible to do good surveillance on large scale mixed waste streams.
My local dump covers materials every day and has enough open ground around it that even a large fire would be contained. They also aren't crushing trash; it goes directly on the pile.
Jonathan
If they don't want these fires to happen, they could make disposal of hazardous household materials easy and free. And they could drop off yearly (quarterly?) reminders about the quick and simple process.
Until the waste companies start doing that, I have to assume they like the smell of burning garbage.
It doesn't even have to wait till they get to the landfill. We ship garbage to landfills in containers - by rail or truck - and those things are internally on fire all the time. Most of the time the crews just ignore the smoke unless it gets extreme.
It doesn't matter how easy they make it, if it involves more than dropping things in the same trash can they always use, a massive chunk of our population will not do it. Meanwhile offering the option for free will cost the waste management companies more than just controlling the fires and they won't get any tax subsidy to offset the cost. Do you know how expensive hazardous waste disposal is? Crazy expensive.
I worked as a laborer in a landfill the summer of 1975. They had dump fires on a frequent basis back then. If I recall most happened after compaction. Dig them up , hose them off and repeat as necessary. Decomposition generates a fair amount of heat and any combustible materials will begin to smolder. I do not recall any HAZMAT materials being allowed in the dump but certainly there was household chemicals.
Of course the alternative to having collection entities deal with this is that people just dispose of this stuff by tossing wherever, and then the disposal and contamination problems just get more expensive and harder to deal with.
The bright side is that people are actually putting this stuff in the collection stream, and not just tossing their trash bags along some roadside.
When I worked for Weyehauser at their site in Longview WA, they had a woodchip pile (paper mill feedstock) alongside the Columbia River that spontaneously ignited a couple of times per week in the summer. They had their own fire trucks to respond to it and hose it down ... of course the damp chips would just reignite that more easily ... so it was kind of a perpetual motion machine.
Real simple here. If you expect fires everyday, prepare to put them out as efficiently as possible. It’s no longer our problem when it leaves home, it’s the disposers problem. Do the job or get out of the way. As the other commenter observed, a real easy reduction would entail safe easy cheap disposal just as common as dumping it in the sea.
Don't glycerin drops put into potassium permanganate do something similar?
I agree with McChuck. I also think waste companies might consider revising the manner in which they process waste employing roller belts with AI to pick out and shunt aside the various materials that might result in/cause conflagration
You want some slightly used bear spray, drop by the Anchorage airport rental car center. All the tourists buy some, carry it around for a week and then drop it off because it can't go on the plane.
it won't take care of the other chemicals, but if lithium is a strategic metal that we have to purchase from overseas, why not offer some sort of refund for used lithium batteries?
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