Discarded battery causes fire at Guernsey Waste premises
ANOTHER fire has been started at Guernsey Waste’s premises because of a battery being inappropriately placed in household rubbish.
A lithium ion battery in a Dyson cordless vacuum is believed to have emitted sparks when passing through machinery at the processing facility on Thursday morning, igniting flammable rubbish around it.
The flames were observed by staff and set off an automated fire suppression system, which doused the refuse with water from sprinklers. The Guernsey Fire & Rescue Service was automatically alerted but stood down when it became clear the fire had been dealt with. Nevertheless, the facility had to shut down for 20 minutes and contractors wanting to deliver waste were kept waiting. Subsequent work was also slowed down due to the saturation of much of the rubbish.
The incident comes despite a recent campaign by Guernsey Waste to warn islanders of the dangers of putting batteries in their bins.
The Check Before You Chuck campaign listed batteries alongside digital cameras, e-cigarettes, flares, gas canisters, laptops and mobile phones as items that should never be put in black bag waste.
Even small batteries like AAAs or the ones in rechargeable toothbrushes, watches or fitbits are sufficient to cause a fire risk due to their propensity to create sparks under pressure.
‘It doesn’t just create a problem for our staff at the waste facility, where we’ve had more than 30 incidents,’ said contracts and compliance manager Rachel Scally, ‘it’s also a risk to our drivers because the fire could just as easily start in a waste collection truck.’
Waste prevention and recycling officer Tina Norman-Ross said taking battery-powered or electrical items to the Household Waste and Recycling Centre not only ensured they would be safely disposed of, it also meant potentially valuable resources could be recovered from them, instead of from new extraction.
‘Once they’ve been picked up by our contractor and shipped off, these items can be sorted into different types and sent out to specialist companies that can then extract things like gold, nickel, silver and cobalt, which reduces the demand for new mining of these products,’ she said.
. Further information can be found at gov.gg/checkb4uchuck and gov.gg/commercialwaste has more details for businesses.
