Properly disposing of used car batteries is important. Whether lead-acid or newfangled lithium-ion, batteries contain toxic and potentially flammable chemicals that can leak if not handled properly. Three recent incidents around the country show that not everybody is aware of this fact.
This past Friday, a City of Rio Bravo, Texas, garbage truck was damaged after a trash container full of car batteries was emptied into it, reports the Laredo Morning Times. A city official told the paper that the damage to the truck was “significant,” but did not go into the details, instead focusing on the need for a specialized mechanic to work on the truck in order to prepare residents for a potential disruption in trash pickups while the truck was out of service.
Garbage trucks squeeze their cargo in large hydraulic compactors. That’s not a good thing when batteries are involved, as crushing them can release chemicals that are an ignition source away from combustion.
That’s exactly what happened earlier this week in Roseville, California. On Wednesday officials in the Northern California city, near the state capital of Sacramento, released a video of lithium-ion batteries catching fire in the back of a garbage truck. They asked residents not to toss these batteries in the trash. Sacramento Fire officials told the local CBS News station that these fires can also release toxic gas, and they happen very quickly.
“Once you see a lithium-ion battery rupture inside the back of a trash truck, the chain reaction happens so quickly and so violently that it causes the fire to expand very rapidly,” Justin Sylvia of Sacramento Fire said.
The same day the City of Roseville released its PSA, the fire department of Troy, Michigan, reported a garbage-truck fire caused by lithium-ion batteries. The driver dumped the truck’s contents in order to prevent the fire from spreading from the bin into the truck itself, according to a Facebook post. Firefighters found a lithium-ion battery among the debris when extinguishing the blaze, which they judged to be the cause.
Incidents like these are nothing new—Gothamist reported on a spate of battery fires in New York City garbage trucks in 2024—but the fact that there were three of them in the span of the week is decidedly not good. Instead of becoming the cause of one of these news stories, always dispose of car batteries at designated recycling points like parts stores and household hazardous waste drop-offs. There’s a reason batteries have that label of a tiny garbage can with a slash through it.