ISO 45001 Certification and Lithium Battery Fires
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Lithium Batteries Are Setting Recycling Facilities on Fire. ISO 45001 Is How You Prove You Saw It Coming.
Every recycling and waste facility in North America is currently living through the same slow-motion escalation. Fire Rover, the fire detection firm that has tracked the industry's incident data for nearly a decade, recorded 448 publicly reported fires at waste and recycling facilities across the United States and Canada in 2025, causing more than $2.5 billion in damage. That's up from 430 fires in 2024, which was itself up from 373 in 2023, and a 58 percent jump from the 272 fires reported back in 2016. Fire protection consultant Ryan Fogelman, who compiles the annual data, puts the increase at roughly 26 percent when comparing the 2022 to 2025 average against 2016 to 2021. None of this is a coincidence, and almost none of it is coming from the material everyone thinks of when it comes to fires. Those materials include paper, cardboard, and plastic, and those don't ignite spontaneously. But lithium-ion batteries do.
A Problem That Starts at the Front Door of an ITAD Facility
For electronics recyclers and ITAD (IT Asset Disposition) companies specifically, this isn't someone else's supply chain problem. It's the material you handle every single day. Every laptop, phone, tablet, and battery pack that arrives at intake carries a cell that can ignite if it's punctured, crushed, overheated, or simply damaged in a way that isn't visible from the outside. On February 21, 2025, a fire at Eastern Metal Recycling in Camden, New Jersey burned for six to eight hours and sent smoke visible for miles, one incident among a growing list that the industry now tracks the way hospitals track infection rates. In Europe, the picture is similar enough that the European Recycling Industries' Confederation has started describing lithium battery fires as an existential risk to companies processing electronic waste, with average damage from a serious thermal event running around 1.3 million euros per incident. Some insurers have simply stopped writing policies for this class of facility altogether.
The Insurance Market Already Knows Something Changed
A joint report from the National Waste & Recycling Association and Resource Recycling Systems found that the rate of catastrophic fire losses at material recovery facilities has climbed 41 percent over five years. Property insurance that used to run somewhere between fifteen and eighteen cents per hundred dollars of insured value has, in some cases, climbed as high as ten dollars per hundred, a shift of more than fifty times in less than a decade. UL Solutions has documented at least 89 deaths in the United States tied directly to lithium-ion battery incidents since 2020. This reflects a nearly 50 percent increase over the previous five-year period. None of these numbers come from a fringe advocacy group. They come from the insurers, fire consultants, and trade associations whose entire job is pricing risk accurately, and they've all reached the same conclusion at roughly the same time.
Why This Is an ISO 45001 Problem, Not Just a Fire Suppression Problem
The industry's initial response has understandably focused on hardware. People are looking for better detection systems, suppression technology, sorting equipment that can flag suspect batteries before they reach a shredder or compactor. That matters, but it treats the fire as the hazard rather than treating the fire as the outcome of a hazard that was never properly assessed in the first place. This is exactly the gap ISO 45001, the international standard for occupational health and safety management systems, is built to close. The standard doesn't ask a facility to buy specific equipment. It asks the facility to prove, through a documented and auditable process, that it identified this exact hazard, assessed how likely it is and how severe the consequences would be, consulted the workers actually handling the material about what they're seeing on the floor, and built an emergency response plan specific to a battery-driven fire rather than a generic one borrowed from a different kind of facility.
In January 2026, the National Waste & Recycling Association, the Recycled Materials Association, and the Solid Waste Association of North America jointly published a Guide for Developing Lithium-Ion Battery Management Practices at Materials Recovery Facilities, calling for exactly this kind of layered, documented approach, recommending earlier identification of suspect batteries, worker training specific to the hazard, safer storage and handling procedures, and emergency planning built around how these fires actually behave rather than how ordinary fires behave. That guide describes, almost point for point, what an ISO 45001-Certified management system already requires a facility to formalize. The difference is that ISO 45001 makes it auditable. An insurer, a client, or a regulator asking whether a facility takes this seriously doesn't have to take anyone's word for it.
What This Looks Like on the Floor
A meaningful hazard assessment under ISO 45001 for an ITAD facility means naming lithium batteries as a distinct hazard category at intake, staging, and processing, not folding them into a generic “fire safety” policy that was written before anyone worried about thermal runaway. It means training records that show workers actually know what a swollen or damaged cell looks like before it gets anywhere near a shredder. It means a documented storage protocol that separates suspect or damaged units rather than letting them sit in the same bin as everything else waiting to be processed. And it means an emergency response plan that accounts for the fact that a lithium battery fire can reignite hours after it appears to be out, which is a detail that changes how a facility actually evacuates and re-enters a building, not just how it fights the fire.
The Cost of Waiting for a Fire to Write the Policy
Every facility that has gone through a catastrophic battery fire built these procedures eventually. The expensive way to get an ISO 45001-grade safety program is to have insurance underwriters, OSHA inspectors, or a local fire marshal write it for you after an incident, on their timeline, with a facility that's already offline and a claim that's already being contested. The alternative is building that same documented, auditable hazard management system now, while it's still a certification project and not an incident report. Given where insurance pricing and public fire data are both headed, that window is closing faster than most facilities realize.
IBEC helps ITAD and electronics recycling companies build ISO 45001 management systems that address the hazards actually present on their floor, including the one now driving insurance costs and incident reports across the entire industry.
Talk with IBEC team experts about what a lithium battery hazard assessment looks like for your facility.
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