Rice County landfill fire highlights need to reduce e

Photo by Getty Images.

I had just spent the week out of state, and I had hundreds of emails to get through on Monday morning. One was from a Rice County resident letting me know that the landfill fire they experienced at the end of May was started by a battery from an electronic device.

I am sad to say I was not at all surprised — most landfill fires start this way. As one county employee told me, what they call “spot fires” happen in their landfill every couple of months. The culprits are always the same: batteries.

Unfortunately for Rice County, one of these “spot fires” happened when no one was on the clock, so that spot turned into the size of a football field, burned thirty feet deep, and lasted for days.

In Minnesota, we generate an estimated 266 million pounds of electronic waste, or e-waste, annually, and just 24% of that is properly recycled. Some of it is still sitting in grandma’s basement in the form of old stereos or big tube TVs, but a lot is ending up in our landfills — and even worse our incinerators.

E-waste contains some nasty stuff. It makes up 70% of the toxins in our waste stream. We’re talking mercury, lead, cadmium, barium, chromium, dioxins and chemical flame retardants from the plastics. When e-waste ends up in our landfills, these toxins come into contact with our water and soil. When e-waste ends up in our incinerators (or a landfill fire), they end up in the air we breathe.

When it comes to e-waste, our goal should be nothing short of 100% proper collection. Although e-waste is a curse is for our solid waste folks, it is valuable to recyclers. E-waste recyclers are experts at extracting valuable material like gold, palladium, platinum, silver, lithium, nickel, and copper from our old electronics.

Folks here in Minnesota are taking a hard look at our current e-waste collection laws. Back when it was first enacted, the 2007 e-waste law was supporting the recycling of 43 million pounds a year, but now it only funds around 20 million pounds per year.

A bill aimed at collecting 100% of our e-waste could prevent landfill fires like what happened in Rice County, while also creating recycling jobs. That’s a win-win.

by Maria Jensen, Minnesota Reformer August 7, 2023

Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our web site. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of photos and graphics.

Maria Jensen started her career in environment, health and safety in the e-waste recycling industry, after graduating with a masters in global health with research related to mercury contamination from electronic waste. Now she does advocacy work around e-waste management.