MECKLENBURG COUNTY, N.C. — Mecklenburg County Solid Waste & Recycling officials are pleading for people to stop throwing lithium-ion batteries in the trash and recycling bins after four fires broke out in Mecklenburg County recycling centers and landfills this week. Two of the fires happened at the Materials Recovery Facility, also known as the MRF, on Amble Drive.
The MRF welcomes 350 tons of recyclables every day, creating several feet deep piles of cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, and more. Unknown to all of the workers on Monday, one of those trucks unloaded a piece of medical equipment containing a lithium-ion battery that someone tried to recycle.
The county scoops and crushes things as they process the recyclables. The piece of medical equipment caught fire.
Mecklenburg County Solid Waste Director Jeff Smithberger says when a lithium-ion battery is exposed to the air, it will light off like a Roman candle. Mecklenburg County has an intense mechanical process that breaks things open. So if someone improperly recycles something with a lithium-ion battery, that spells disaster.
It really falls on residents to make sure they are not creating a hazardous situation. If someone wrongly recycles a lithium-ion battery, it can be hard to tell.
“They blend in,” Smithberger said. “They are generally gray or black in color. They look like the rest of the recycling materials that come to us.”
The county has heat detectors that set off an alert for workers when there’s a fire. The problem is sometimes these batteries are deep in the piles of recyclables, so the fire is able to go undetected and spread before the alarm sounds.
Typically, there are as many as 8 fires a month because of improper recycling. On Monday alone, there were three.
Smithberger is pleading for people to properly recycle lithium-ion batteries by bringing them to one of their full-service recycling centers and to not throw anything with batteries into bins.
“It’s dangerous, and we want people to understand those inherent dangers and to just take care of them the right way the first time so that we don’t have to worry about this,” he said.
On Monday, there were two other lithium-ion batteries at the Foxhole Landfill & Recycling Center. The first happened at 11:45 a.m. A Solid Waste employee spotted the fire and quickly reported it. He and two other employees used a water truck to extinguish the fire. They found a large, car-sized lithium-ion battery while extinguishing the fire. About three hours later, a fire sparked when a customer tried to destroy an iPad with a hammer. The customer claimed he wanted to destroy the device to prevent anyone from accessing his information. The county says that when he hit the iPad, he damaged the battery and caused it to catch fire. Workers used a fire blanket to put it out.
The fourth fire of the week happened hours after Channel 9 interviewed Smithberger for this story.
He tells Channel 9 the fire once again originated from a battery and caught the paper bunker on fire. The fire department had to respond, and the staff was evacuated. The sprinkler system went off, and there was no serious damage, but the county lost about four hours of production and had to reinstall the sprinkler system.
You can properly recycle lithium-ion batteries by dropping them off at one of Mecklenburg County’s four full-service recycling centers. You cannot throw them in your trash bin, recycling bin, or dumpster.
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