CATUS, France — Every day at the Syded waste treatment plant in the Lot region of southwestern France, the company collects, sorts and treats up to 80 metric tons of household and business waste.
And every day, its 266 employees have to look out for an electric toothbrush, a single-use vape or a broken toy that could set the whole place on fire.
“Had you called me 4 or 5 years ago I would have said [fires occur] ‘from time to time’ but now the risk of fire defines my day-to-day,” said Hervé Coulaud, environment director at the Syded plant.
The problem, it turns out, is batteries — specifically, lithium-ion batteries. As the technology has advanced and the batteries have become smaller and more efficient, they’ve shown up in ever more household goods, from musical birthday cards to diapers that beep when they’re too wet.
But if these tiny power sources aren’t removed and disposed of separately when an item is thrown away, they end up in mainstream waste plants and get crushed.
And that’s the moment they can ignite and send the whole place up in flames.
The number of reported fires connected to lithium batteries or electronic waste doubled between 2019 and 2023 at French waste management facilities, according to data from the French environment ministry’s bureau for industrial pollution and risk analysis, studied by POLITICO. Most of the increase was due to incidents involving a lithium battery mixed in with regular waste.
The numbers greatly understate the scale of problem, however. The ministry’s database draws from company reports and whatever information the firms can give about the incidents. Like most other public and private waste facilities, Syded only reports incidents where the fire department is involved, not the many others they manage to control themselves.
The cause of a fire can also be hard to nail down. “Lithium batteries are often the suspect because of where the fire starts and the type of smoke, but they cannot always be clearly identified,” Jean-Loup Oudin, Syded’s communications director, told POLITICO.
In other EU countries, such as Belgium and the Netherlands, local municipalities are witnessing similar trends. Wendy de Wild, CEO of NVRD, a Dutch organization representing municipalities and public companies in charge of local waste management and collection, told POLITICO that “I can easily estimate that every week we have a collection vehicle experiencing a fire.”
As fires become more common, waste treatment plants are incurring additional costs to purchase protective equipment, train their staff, and pay rising insurance premiums.
Calls are mounting for the EU to act as the bloc reviews its rules on waste management, from electric and electronic waste to single-use items.
Lithium, lithium everywhere
The problem with battery-powered products — which range from disposable e-cigarettes to light-up sneakers, children’s toys and jackets equipped with phone chargers — is that consumers don’t always know what to do with them once they stop working.
“We see a 20 percent increase annually of the presence of lithium batteries in the consumer market,” de Wild said. But that growth isn’t always accompanied by needed information on safe disposal.
In her view, electronic cigarettes are the biggest problem. “The consumer doesn’t entirely realize [a vape] contains a battery” she said, “and when they throw it away, they throw it away in the residual waste [bin].”
When waste gets collected by garbage trucks, it typically gets crushed in order to save space inside the vehicle, and that’s when the batteries can be damaged. Waste also goes through mechanical processes inside treatment plants that can also damage batteries.
To make things worse, fires caused by damaged lithium batteries are much harder to manage.
When lithium batteries overheat, it can lead to a thermal runaway. The lithium-ion cells heat up uncontrollably — sometimes rising to temperatures as high as 600 degrees Celsius — causing the battery to set itself on fire.
“You can deprive the fire [of] oxygen, you can spray it with water, it won’t work — they’ll burn,” explained Coulaud, Syded’s environment director. “All you can do is to reduce the damage by separating the burning battery from the rest of the waste.”
For local waste management plants, the heightened risks are costing them a fortune.
Between thermal cameras and smoke detectors, precision water canons that can be operated at a distance, and operational improvements, the extra cost to Syded is around €300,000 to €400,000 a year, Coulaud said.
And that doesn’t factor in the insurance burden for facilities that see regular fires.
In Belgium’s Flanders region, for example, some facilities simply won’t be covered by insurance from January 2025 because of price rises, according to a spokesperson from VVSG, the association of Flemish cities and municipalities.
Another waste headache
The EU has been trying to tackle the bloc’s mammoth waste issue for years, from banning problematic waste exports to reducing food and textile residues, and recycling batteries to retain the precious metals used to make them.
Some argue effective waste management laws could reduce the fire hazard as well.
Items such as washing machines and mobile phones already fall under the EU’s extended producer responsibility requirements, meaning that manufacturers have to take charge of how the items they sell will be disposed of, usually by paying for an appropriate waste disposal solution. One option could be to extend this requirement to all products containing batteries.
“When producers bring a product to the market, they also bring the risks to the market so they at least have a partial responsibility,” de Wild noted.
This responsibility can also encourage manufacturers to design better and safer products, and to make it easier for citizens to take the battery out of the object before throwing it out, said the VVSG spokesperson.
But over at the Lot waste facility, Coulaud thinks the solution is far more local.
“The first thing to do is to raise awareness about sorting waste and not throwing out these items in the recycling bin. It can seem simple, but that is true prevention.”