The €100m problem - Near-miss in Mayo highlights danger of vape fires

IT is almost a year since the quick thinking of both the driver and the helper avoided a bin lorry potentially exploding in the Golden Mile Industrial Estate in Castlebar.

The fire inside the truck was caused by a vape and started when the lithium-ion battery sparked after it was compressed.

New figures from the waste industry estimate that the damage caused by vapes to trucks and facilities exceeded €50 million in 2025 alone.

Stanley Bourke, Managing Director of Bourke Waste, recalls how lucky his team were to have caught the fire so early.

“At the end of the day, we were all lucky that there was nobody hurt, and with no damage. We tipped it out and at the time, luckily there wasn't that much in the lorry, and it was clean recycling material”, Mr Bourke told The Mayo News.

His team had been collecting commercial recycling in Castlebar when a helper discovered a fire had broken out at the back of the bin truck.

The driver pulled away from the building very quickly and tipped the load out onto the ground and away from the building.

“He had no choice because if he didn't the whole lorry would blow up”, Mr Bourke tells The Mayo News.

Fortunately, the lorry hadn’t travelled far between pick-ups because it was not possible to see the fire while driving.

This near-miss in an industrial estate in Castlebar highlights the broader issue of batteries in waste.

€100 million problem

CONOR Walsh, Director of the Irish Waste Management Association (IWMA), tells The Mayo News that over the last three years vapes have caused over €100 million worth of damage to the industry.

In 2025, the internal survey of 37 members estimated the costs to be €50 million in just twelve months. The real cost is likely to be higher as the increase in insurance premiums is not included in these figures.

He notes that over the last five years, “nine waste facilities burned down in Ireland, and that could be 18 in the next five years, if nothing is done.”

In order to get insurance, waste plants now have to have a pre-sorting process. This involves workers physically pulling vapes out of the waste.

The IWMA remarks that a number of facilities are pulling out between two and three tonnes of vapes every couple of months. Given the average weight of vapes is about 30 grams, this equates to millions of vapes.

Among these was a recycling facility in Galway that likely services Mayo.

“It's a sheer numbers game. In 2024, there were 31 million vapes on the market in Ireland but only one million vapes were recycled through the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) system”, the IWMA director says.

“So there's 30 million vapes in our bins so that's the numbers game. Each individual vape is not particularly dangerous but when they're crushed and they spark and there's a flammable solvent in them. You can get a spark when the electrodes come together.”

Stanley Bourke highlights that “it's not just vapes, other items that have batteries would have similar danger as vapes.

“When charged, they're alive and if they touch, they can cause a spark and because lorries have high compression that's going to greatly increase the chance of a fire.

“A fire in a waste plant needs to be stopped awfully fast because it will just take off.”

“The bottom line message will be here is that anything with a battery should not be going in the waste bin.”

Statement

IN a statement to The Mayo News, McGrath Waste said that while it hasn’t had “any serious fire incidents, it is an issue that concerns us greatly. Vapes and other items containing lithium-ion batteries pose a risk to our business every day when they are placed in our bins, compactors or skips. We have seen eight waste management facilities around the country burn down in the last 5 years and that impacts on the availability of outlets for the waste that we collect.

“It also increases insurance costs for every company in the waste management sector.

“We support the IWMA call for greater Producer Responsibility from those that place batteries and vapes on the market and we believe that a Return scheme for vapes is urgently needed to protect our staff and the wider public interest.”

Conor Walsh says the message is partly to the public to make people aware and not to put these in their bins.

“We're not blaming the public because we think the producers haven't done enough, and producers have a responsibility. It's really down to the producers to incentivise and to educate users to bring the vapes back to the shops.”