Two Thousand Pounds of Batteries Pulled from a Wisconsin Recycling Center

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-09-18 — Waste360 (recycling/scrap)

A recycling center pulls 2,000 pounds of batteries off the line in one month. You'd think that was fine—batteries get recycled, right?

Not like this.

The Outagamie County Recycling and Solid Waste facility in Wisconsin saw an uptick in loose batteries making it into the general stream this summer. Jordan Hiller, the county's recycling coordinator, said they yanked over 2,000 pounds in just over thirty days. That's 500 pounds more than they saw earlier in the year. More or less a tenfold jump in problem batteries, month on month.

Here's the thing though—it's not a recycling efficiency problem. It's a fire problem.

The issue sits with lithium-ion batteries. The kind that live inside your phone, your cordless drill, your rechargeable headphones. Squeeze one in a compactor. Crush it under pressure. Damage the cell. What happens next is called thermal runaway. The battery overheats fast, sparks, ignites. And when that spark meets a pile of cardboard and mixed paper—which makes up about 70 percent of what comes through these facilities—you don't just get a contained burn.

Actually, that's not quite right. You don't get anything contained at all. According to Hiller, one of those batteries could take down the entire facility. Not damage it. Not cause a setback. Take it down.

Battery fires at waste and recycling plants have been climbing for years. Summer 2025 alone recorded over 100 fires across North America in a two-month window. July and August are consistently the worst—the industry calls it the "summertime spike." Heat, pressure, damaged cells, and ignorance of what's actually in your discarded devices. Something like that is what causes the problem to compound each year.

People don't realise they're throwing away a battery. You toss out an old cordless tool, a pair of earbuds you found at the back of a drawer, a toy with a burnt-out remote. The battery stays inside. It makes it into the recycling bin because you assume batteries are safe to recycle if they're sitting in something else. They're not.

The county is now asking people to take batteries—loose ones, ones inside devices—to the Resource Recovery Park instead. Free drop-off. No questions. That's the pattern now at facilities across the country. People have to be told to handle the thing they think is harmless like it's a loaded spring.

So far Outagamie County has caught the problem before it became a different kind of incident altogether.

Source: "Over 2,000 pounds of batteries were pulled off the line in just over a month." — WFRV Local 5

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