In 2025, a record number of publicly reported waste and recycling facility fire incidents were documented in the United States and Canada, marking the highest annual total since tracking began in 2016.
Behind those figures is a shift in the waste stream itself, with lithium-ion batteries, particularly from disposable vapes and small consumer electronics, introducing ignition risks that many facilities were not designed to manage.
Ryan Fogelman, J.D., MBA, Fire Protection Consultant at Fire Rover and 2025 International Fire and Safety Journal Industry Influencer, has spent over a decade analysing publicly reported waste and recycling facility fires across the United States and Canada.
Through his annual Waste Facility Fires Report and his work advising operators, insurers and policymakers, Fogelman has documented how processing volumes, battery prevalence, site practices, insurance exposure and emergency response dynamics are converging to reshape the sector’s risk profile.
Operators are contending with extended rebuild times, rising claims and changing seasonal fire patterns, and attention is turning to how facilities detect ignition earlier, contain incidents before escalation and coordinate more effectively with fire services and insurers.
FSJA Editor Iain Hoey sat down with Ryan Fogelman to discuss what the data reveals about the trajectory of waste facility fires and what it means for the industry’s next steps.
We finished 2025 with 448 publicly reported waste and recycling facility fires in the US and Canada, which makes it the worst year since I began tracking this data in 2016.
That’s more than last year’s record of 430 incidents and roughly 25% above the historical annual average of about 360 fires.
In 2025, we saw four consecutive record-setting months: July with 56 fires, August with 49, September with 45 and October with 48.
Historically, I used to describe what we saw as a summertime spike.
What we’re seeing now is a different risk pattern. The baseline risk has increased. The spike extends deeper into the year and, in some cases, starts earlier.
When you compare the 2022 to 2025 period to the 2016 to 2021 period, we’re looking at roughly a 26% increase in publicly reported fires.
Facilities today are processing more material, more quickly and with more embedded lithium-ion batteries than ever before.
Waste and recycling operators are managing a fire risk that largely originates upstream through product design, consumer behavior and disposal practices.
The numbers signal that this risk is systemic and growing.
Addressing it requires a layered approach that includes technology, policy, education and operational change so the trend can be stabilized.
The vape effect is very real. When I coined that term, it described a clear trend emerging in the data.
We’re seeing nearly 1.2 billion single-use disposable vapes entering the market and many of those devices end up in household waste streams without proper disposal pathways.
These devices contain small lithium-ion cells hidden within plastic and paper waste, metal streams and organics. They get compacted, crushed, shredded and pushed through heavy machinery and when they fail, they ignite.
When we review the increase in reported fire incidents, a significant portion of that rise is attributable to lithium-ion batteries, particularly disposable vapes and small personal electronics.
Operators are investing in detection, suppression and training.
However, they only gain visibility into incoming risks once material reaches the pile.
Manufacturers have created a product that combines a lithium-ion battery with a disposable consumer item, but there isn’t the infrastructure to collect it safely.
Even with technology like Fire Rover protecting hundreds of facilities, prevention has to start upstream.
That includes safe drop-off locations, education campaigns, extended producer responsibility policies and product design changes that make batteries removable.
Let me start by saying this clearly: this is not a criticism of fire departments.
Firefighters do incredible work under extremely difficult conditions.
But we have to be honest about the reality as we’ve seen facilities take 36 months or more to rebuild after a catastrophic fire.
Most municipal fire departments are trained and equipped primarily for residential, commercial and light industrial incidents.
Waste and recycling facilities present high-hazard industrial environments that involve heavy equipment, deep-seated material piles, embedded lithium-ion batteries, limited access points and often very large footprints.
When a fire department is dispatched, even in the best-case scenario, response time ranges from 8 to 12 minutes, longer if you include the time to prepare to fight.
In waste and recycling operations, the first 6 to 10 minutes determine whether the outcome remains minor or escalates into a major or catastrophic loss.
In many cases, when fire departments arrive at these facilities, they go into containment mode.
They deploy large-caliber hose lines from a safe distance.
That approach protects firefighters and maintains safety as the priority, while also resulting in tens of thousands or sometimes hundreds of thousands of gallons of water usage, along with significant operational downtime.
The goal is to stabilize the incident before escalation reaches the point where firefighters face elevated risk.
Your local fire department should absolutely be part of your emergency response plan and should operate alongside additional protection layers like Fire Rover.
Fire Rover operates as an early detection and remote suppression system designed specifically for high-risk, high-activity indoor and outdoor industrial environments like waste and recycling facilities.
Our systems use thermal cameras, flame detection and advanced analytics to continuously monitor active areas of a site.
When the system identifies a thermal anomaly, smoke or flame, that alert is sent to one of our listed monitoring centers, where trained Fire Rover agents verify, confirm and respond to the event in real time.
If suppression is required, the agent deploys a targeted water stream, using either a straight stream or fog pattern, directly at the source of ignition and around any collateral assets that need protected.
That can be the difference between a small thermal event growing into a multi-alarm fire.
Once suppression begins, our agents manage the critical early stage of the incident.
They communicate with site personnel, escalate if needed and help bring order to an active emergency response.
In 2025 alone, we identified and responded to more than 3,500 confirmed hotspots and helped suppress approximately 450 fire events globally.
Our systems used an average of about 600 gallons of water per event, which is dramatically lower than traditional sprinkler systems or manual response methods.
The goal is simple: detect early, act quickly and prevent escalation.
FM Approvals certification is a formal validation of Fire Rover’s performance.
In 2025, we achieved full FM Approvals certification for the Fire Rover primary continuous flow system, making Fire Rover the first and only FM Approved smart monitor of its kind.
Operators gain confidence because the detection, hardware, monitoring and suppression components were evaluated as a fully integrated system.
Fire Rover also ensures that these systems are properly monitored, maintained and online 24/7/365.
For insurers, certification provides measurable validation. Insurance carriers focus on reducing probable maximum loss and evaluating whether solutions perform consistently under stress in real-world conditions.
We hit our ten-year anniversary in 2025, and we are proud of our performance over that time responding to and suppressing thousands of fires on our customers’ front lines.
This track record, combined with FM validation, allows insurers to treat Fire Rover as a recognized risk mitigation layer that can allow for positive consideration when evaluating risk at their clients’ facilities.
FM Approval marks a transition from emerging technology into a validated fire protection system, which we are excited about as we look to protect more sites outside of our current occupancies.
But just having FM approval is not enough.
We still need to drive awareness of the uniqueness of our solution and continue to bring it to new markets and industries.
Our solution tends to get lumped in with other early detection solutions that have a number of flaws that we have worked through in our layers of protection and reliability that allow our system to perform at the level it does for our customers.
The 9th Annual Waste Facility Fires Report will include the full analysis of 2025, the worst year on record since I began compiling this data in 2016.
In this year’s report, I break down those incidents by material category, geography and timing. Fires were up about 4% for the year, but 25% from the historical average.
Waste, paper and plastics facilities continued to account for nearly half of reported fires but were in line with 2024.
Fires at scrap metal recycling yards temporarily exceeded historical norms during September and October, a trend we continue to experience.
Hazardous material, environmental, construction and demolition, rubber and organics facilities also increased compared to previous years.
The weather analysis shows fire activity extending beyond traditional summer peaks into additional months of the year.
Lithium-ion batteries remain a primary driver, particularly disposable vapes and embedded batteries entering waste streams.
The report also expands injury and fatality analysis to provide clearer insight into workforce and firefighter risk.
My goal with these reports has always been to help the industry make informed decisions and provide a tool to help the public understand the effects of their actions.
The reality is that waste and recycling operators are the victims in this equation.
They are having hazards dropped at their front doors and are responsible for dealing with them whether they like it or not.
As one of my scrap metal contacts said earlier this week, we have signs everywhere that say we do not accept batteries.
But like most hazards that sneak through loads of material, they receive these hazards whether they accept them or not.
The full report will be released in March 2026, providing detailed analysis of the year’s fire activity.
