By Lydia Crawley, The Parsons Advocate
PARSONS, W.Va. — A small landfill fire sparked a discussion among the board regarding the safety of lithium ion batteries and the disposal of the batteries by the general public. The fire, according to Tucker County Solid Waste Authority Presiding Chair Mark Holstine was small and occurred over a month prior to the August 19th meeting. “We did have a fire,” Holstine said. “Just to kind of let you know how lithium ion batteries are a problem, especially for us in the waste industry,” Holstine said.
Holstine acknowledged that the batteries were not definitely determined to be the cause of the fire and that any correlation was pure speculation without further investigation. “We don’t know that, that is what happened,” Holstine said. “But we can almost bet that it was that started the fire in the field. Its just a problem.”
Holstine said he knew that customers place lithium ion batteries into the trash. Once in the landfill, Holstine said, the batteries are subject to the same process as the rest of the refuse such as the tracks of the compacter. “People throw them away,” Holstine said. “You crack them, you run over them, we all run a compacter over them, so most likely they will get cracked, they will get exposed to water all that.”
Tucker County Solid Waste Authority Vice Chair Dennis Filler said that the batteries did not combust due to exposure to water, as many people think. “So contrary to popular belief,” Filler said, “a lithium battery does not catch fire by getting wet. Raw lithium metal does catch fire that way because that’s how the chemistry works,” Filler said. “But these are not only lithium ion.”
Read more: https://parsonsadvocate.com/news/pa-top-stories/headlines/landfill-fire-sparks-battery-discussion/
