Fire Rover challenges media to shift its recycling topic

A common local television station attempt at investigative reporting involves following residential curbside recycling trucks to see whether they drive to a materials recovery facility (MRF) or instead to a municipal solid waste (MSW) transfer station or landfill.

One recent such effort has been met with criticism from Ryan Fogelman, a partner with Michigan-based fire suppression equipment supplier Fire Rover. In an email and LinkedIn post, Fogelman focuses not on the TV station’s choice to investigate, but rather that it used battery-powered tracking devices embedded in products placed in recycling bins.

Responding to a broadcast and posted by Indianapolis station WTHR, Fogelman writes in part, “Wow, a local television station deliberately places trackers with ‘batteries’ in the recycling stream to track if your recycling is going to the landfill or a MRF.”

The investigation, to the credit of intended targets WM and Republic Services, did not find any instances of recyclables being brought to landfills. The subsequent report also provides a glimpse into how MRFs operate and why recyclable commodities like aluminum used beverage cans (UBCs) and old corrugated containers (OCC) are welcome there.

The story posted to the WTHR website quotes a WM employee as saying, “These are very valuable aluminum bales. Each one of these bales is about $1,300 in value. No way do I want that going to landfill.”

Fogelman says, “The rumor that the public incorrectly believes that your curbside recycling isn't recycled isn’t true.

“The news station potentially made the problem worse by using trackers and cameras that needed charging to work properly,” he adds. “The reality is that different GPS tracking devices use various types of batteries, including alkaline batteries and rechargeable lithium-ion or lithium-polymer batteries; they did exactly what the public should not do: place batteries and electronics into the curbside recycling bin!”

At a battery recycling conference held this week, Hakan Johansson of Sweden-based fire suppression technology provider Firefly AB observed the lithium-ion flammability problem is global in scale.

Speaking at the Asia INTL Li-Ion Battery Recycling Summit 2023 in Singapore, Johansson said recycling facilities in the United Kingdom average one fire per day (although not all are caused by batteries).

Johansson said lithium-ion batteries are capable of spontaneous ignition, especially when batteries are exposed to the type of damage that can occur when they are introduced to shredding, collection truck compaction or fast-moving sorting equipment.

The types of thermal runaway fires they can cause are difficult to manage and extinguish, he added. Johansson urged managers in standardization organizations to think beyond productivity and quality issues and consider ways to address battery handling in waste and recycling settings.

In the United States, Fogelman and Fire Rover regularly distribute information urging waste and recycling companies to be on high alert for batteries and take measures to have the proper fire suppression systems on hand.

Although not in the TV programming business, Fogelman has a recommendation for stations that may wish to offer some recycling-related news. “I suggest that the news (local or national) spend more time driving awareness of the hazards the public is [causing by] incorrectly placing into their curbside recycling bins [items] that are causing the fires, including but not limited to batteries, electronics, vapes [and] accelerants.”