The battery fire debate has settled on kerbside. Jack Cartwright, a Director at Innovent Recycling, a UK provider of secure IT asset disposal and WEEE recycling services, argues that end-of-life business IT is a separate risk category with its own failure mode – and that it will not be reached by kerbside reform.
When the sector talks about lithium battery fires, it usually talks about kerbside. That is where the volume is, where the public behaviour problem sits, and where the policy debate has landed.
The National Fire Chiefs Council recorded more than 1,200 battery-related fires in refuse vehicles and waste facilities across 2023/24, a 71 per cent rise on the preceding twelve months, and the ESA now puts the annual cost to the UK at over £1 billion – up from around £150 million in 2021. Almost all of the public messaging that follows those numbers is aimed at householders, and rightly so.
There is a second stream that gets far less attention, and it behaves differently: end-of-life IT from businesses.
Why business IT is not simply kerbside at a larger scale
Three things make the corporate stream its own risk category.
The first is dwell time. A household battery usually goes into a drawer for a few months. A decommissioned business laptop routinely sits in a storeroom for one to three years after the refresh that retired it. Nobody has decided what to do with it, it is not in anyone’s budget, and it has already come off the asset register.
Lithium cells do not sit still while they wait – they age, and cells left at a very high or very low state of charge for long periods degrade faster than cells in use. By the time somebody books a collection, a proportion of that stock is in worse condition than when it was retired, and nobody has looked at it in the interim.
Lithium cells do not sit still while they wait – they age, and cells left at a very high or very low state of charge for long periods degrade faster than cells in use.
The second is cell size and format. This stream is not AAs. It is laptop packs, tablet batteries, UPS units, and the battery in every piece of peripheral hardware that used to be mains-powered or passive. A UPS in a comms room represents a meaningful quantity of stored energy, and it has often been on float charge for years past its recommended replacement date.
The third is who handles it. Kerbside is handled by waste professionals. A business IT clear-out is usually handled by whoever has the keys – facilities, an office manager, an IT contractor, sometimes a general clearance firm. These are competent people, but battery hazard awareness is not part of the role, and there is rarely a written procedure that covers it.
The hidden battery problem, in an office setting
The ESA’s estimate that around 1.1 billion of the batteries discarded in the UK each year are hidden inside electrical devices is usually illustrated with toothbrushes and vapes. In an office decommission it looks different: the battery is inside something nobody thinks of as a battery-containing item at all.
Wireless keyboards and mice. Headsets. Label printers. Presentation clickers. Door-entry fobs. Legacy tablets in a drawer. Handheld scanners in a warehouse office.
They get collected loose, tipped into a crate with everything else, and the crate gets stacked. Unassessed cells, mixed with hard-cornered metal objects, under compression, moved by hand – that is the sequence in which most avoidable incidents actually begin.
What good practice looks like before collection day
Most of the risk in this stream is designed out before a vehicle arrives, not on it.
Separate anything visibly damaged, and separate it early. Swelling is the signal that matters most: a pack that has deformed its casing, a laptop base that no longer sits flat, a trackpad or keyboard that has visibly lifted. Puncture and heat damage count too. These items want isolating when they are first noticed, not when they are being loaded.
Do not let anyone remove cells on site. This is the most common well-intentioned mistake. Someone decides the batteries ought to come out before disposal and starts prising packs out of laptop chassis with a screwdriver in a corridor. Mechanical damage during removal is a far more likely ignition route than leaving the device intact. Devices should travel whole.
A single compromised cell in the middle of a pallet of otherwise healthy equipment turns a contained problem into a large one.
Do not stockpile damaged items alongside sound ones. A single compromised cell in the middle of a pallet of otherwise healthy equipment turns a contained problem into a large one. Damaged items want a separate non-combustible container, away from the main store.
Say what you have, in advance. The most useful thing a facilities team can do is tell the contractor before the vehicle is loaded: how many UPS units, whether anything is swollen, whether anything has been dropped or exposed to water, and how long the stock has been sitting. That one conversation changes how a competent operator plans packaging, segregation and loading order.
Finally, look at where the stock actually lives. Long-term IT stores default to whatever space is convenient, which is often a comms room, a basement, or a cupboard on an escape route. Assessing where retired IT accumulates, on the same basis as any other stored-goods fire risk, is a short exercise that rarely gets done.
Where the safety case and the circular case point the same way
The reuse-first argument is normally made on carbon and resource grounds. In battery terms it is also the lower-risk route, for a straightforward reason: every additional handling step is an opportunity for mechanical damage, and reuse involves fewer of them.
A device that is tested, wiped and redeployed keeps its cell in the condition it was designed to sit in – inside a protective chassis, in circuit with its management electronics, cycling within its normal range. A device routed to material recovery has its cell removed, handled, transported and processed, and each of those stages is a point at which a cell can be crushed, punctured or short-circuited.
That reframes the reuse decision slightly. Reuse is not only the better environmental outcome for a working machine; it is also the outcome that strips away the fewest safeguards. It argues for speed, too.
The longer the gap between retirement and a decision, the more likely the device has degraded past the point where reuse is viable – at which point the only route left is the one with more handling steps in it.
Four questions worth asking a contractor
For anyone specifying an IT disposal contract, four questions surface most of what matters: how are damaged or swollen cells identified on arrival, and by whom? Where are they isolated to, and in what? How is battery-containing equipment packaged and loaded for transport? And what comes back afterwards as evidence of how it was handled?
The answers do not need to be elaborate. What matters is whether a defined process exists at all, and whether the people doing the work on the day know what it is.
The gap in the policy conversation
The ESA’s policy briefing last September called for mandatory universal kerbside collection of waste batteries and small electricals. That is the right intervention for the household stream and it is overdue.
But the business IT stream will not be reached by kerbside reform. It is reached through procurement, through facilities practice, and through duty of care conversations that happen while a refresh is being planned rather than eighteen months after it.
The equipment is already sitting in the storeroom. The question is what condition it will be in when somebody finally opens the door.
