Managing director Mel Mustafa told Letsrecycle.com that the waste management company’s cameras and alarm system alerted it to a fire at approximately 12:50am.
Staff were at the scene in Essex within 20 minutes and removed vehicles from the site to prevent the spread of the fire and save as much equipment as possible.
The fire service was on site for 24 hours for almost a week. The fire was confirmed extinguished on 20 September.
The TLM Environmental team said that it believes the fire started from a lithium battery in its inbound stack prior to being processed.
Mustafa added: “Sadly, this isn’t the first fire with the same route cause in our industry.
“It seems as though there has been a surge in fires in recent months relating to lithium batteries and unfortunately there aren’t any measures we can act upon to stop this from happening other than spreading awareness for the devastation that can follow from not disposing of these items in the correct way.
“We urge the public and businesses alike to take the appropriate measures to dispose of batteries, vapes and any other fire hazardous materials to segregate their bins so they can be contained and disposed of appropriately.”
The TLM Environmental plea has joined calls from other waste management companies for action to prevent WEEE fires.
Last month, Veolia reported that it was seeing an average of one fire a day from WEEE and urged the public to display caution when throwing away e-waste.
The industry is particularly concerned by the increase in the popularity of single use vapes. Decision makers across the world are looking at ways to mitigate the problem, with the Irish government announcing earlier this month that it is moving ahead with a vape ban on environmental and public health grounds.
If you want to find out more about fire safety and prevention, make sure you attend the Fire Prevention and Control Conference 2024 in Birmingham on 13 November 2024. See the full agenda and book tickets here.
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