Battery fires in Europe: €2.6 billion a year in damage – what FEAD’s new estimate shows

Battery fires in Europe are no longer a local problem for individual plants but a systemic risk for the entire EU waste sector. That is the message of a new estimate published on 3 November 2026 by FEAD, the European Waste Management Association, which for the first time puts an EU-wide figure on a phenomenon we have so far known mainly from national surveys. In mid-October we analysed the German associations’ fire study in detail, which used data from 181 facilities to show that the number of fires nearly tripled in five years. FEAD now draws the same picture at European scale – and the German data are just one slice of it.

In short: According to FEAD’s estimate, battery fires in Europe caused around 10,900 fires and €2.66 billion in damage in the EU waste sector in 2025, roughly 30 incidents a day. Nine in ten of these fires never become public, and the costs fall almost entirely on waste operators – which is why the association is calling for a producer-funded fund, a deposit system for batteries and a ban on disposable battery-powered products.

What does FEAD’s new estimate say?

FEAD based its EU-27 estimate on national data supplied by its member associations. The key figures:

• Damage in 2025: around €2.66 billion in the EU waste sector.
• Damage 2023–2025: around €7.3 billion in total.
• Prevention investment: around €730 million in 2025 and roughly €2 billion over 2023–2025.
• Number of incidents: around 10,900 battery fires in 2025, or roughly 30 a day.
• Growth: 27 per cent in two years, up from around 8,600 in 2023.
• Share: around six in ten of the sector’s estimated 17,500 fires in 2025 were linked to batteries.

Adding damage and prevention investment together, the sector’s burden in 2025 came close to €3.4 billion. Simple division gives an average of around €244,000 in damage per battery fire – but, as we explain below, that average can be misleading.

The association stresses that these costs fall almost entirely on waste management companies, while insurance cover for waste operations is becoming harder and more expensive to obtain. According to FEAD Secretary General Paolo Campanella, waste workers put out fires caused by misplaced batteries every day, and although operators are investing heavily in prevention, they cannot carry this burden on their own.

Thirty fires a day – and most go unnoticed

Perhaps the most important finding in FEAD’s release concerns visibility. Of the roughly 10,900 battery fires in 2025, only around 1,100 became publicly known. For every fire that makes the news, nine more are quietly extinguished on site by waste workers. In Norway, the fire service had to intervene in only 4 per cent of fires in 2025, and the Austrian study explicitly treats press-reported cases as the tip of the iceberg.

This matches what we found when analysing the German study: by 2025, 54 per cent of fire events were brought under control by plant staff, and the fire brigade was called to only around 8 per cent of fires in the narrower sense. FEAD frames this clearly as an occupational safety issue: every time workers tackle a fire, they put their own safety at risk, even where companies invest heavily in prevention, protection and fire training.

The association itself notes that the estimate should be read as a lower bound. Countries define and record fires differently, and many small fires extinguished on site are never logged. In Belgium, the sector reckons with one fire every three days, but there is no uniform register measuring the real frequency there either.

Battery fires in Europe: the German study is only one slice of the picture

FEAD’s release refers directly to the German study commissioned by BDE among others, which we covered in detail. According to it, the 181 surveyed German facilities reported around 2,000 fires and 3,000 dangerous hotspot events in 2025 – roughly 14 incidents a day in this sample alone, about 90 per cent of them attributed to lithium batteries. This is fully consistent with what we recorded in our analysis: between 2021 and 2025, fires rose from 729 to 2,028 and hotspots from 1,202 to 2,992.

FEAD’s compilation shows that the German trend is no exception:

• Netherlands: fires in waste management more than quadrupled between 2016 and 2024.
• Belgium: press-reported fires nearly tripled between 2023 and 2025.
• Germany: fires also nearly tripled between 2021 and 2025.
• Austria: publicly known fires rose almost fifteenfold, from 10 to 147, between 2007/08 and 2024/25.

The Austrian figure comes from a study carried out with VOEB, which we previously covered under the message that anything that sings or flashes must always be collected separately. With the rate having quadrupled in ten years, a tonne of residual waste now contains more than eight lithium batteries, so an average collection truck of about 8.5 tonnes carries roughly 70 potential ignition sources. FEAD attributes the increase to a simple cause: more and more everyday products contain batteries, from disposable vapes to toys, smartwatches and earphones.

The causal picture is consistent too. In Belgium, batteries are suspected in 75 per cent of fires, and in Norway they caused 76 per cent of the 2025 fires where the cause was known. Since the cause of many fires is never established – the German study found that in 71 per cent of battery-related cases the specific product could not be identified – FEAD also expects the real share to be higher than the estimated six in ten.

Location matters as well. FEAD reports fires at every point along the waste chain, from the bin lorry through sorting plants to landfills. In the Netherlands, around 40 per cent of fires occur during collection, and the French ARIA accident database records battery-related fires in every type of facility, from collection to final treatment. The list of affected streams is almost exhaustive: residual household waste, packaging, paper and cardboard, bulky waste, furniture, metals, WEEE and landfill operations. This confirms a key finding of the German study: nearly half of fires start before the first processing machine, in the tipping and storage zone or in vehicles.

Who pays the bill?

The economic core of FEAD’s message is that those who bear the risk are not those who create it. Waste operators do not decide which products are placed on the market, how batteries are built into them or how easy it is to return them properly – yet they pay the consequences of poorly collected batteries, from machinery damage to downtime.

Insurance sharpens the problem further. The German fire study documented rising premiums and deductibles, stricter fire protection requirements and policy cancellations after fires. FEAD now states the same at European level: cover is becoming harder and costlier to obtain.

The average damage of around €244,000 per fire should be treated with caution. German data show that around 90 per cent of fires cause no significant material damage, while 70–80 per cent of total damage is concentrated in a small number of severely affected plants. The EU damage figure is therefore probably driven not by the thirty small fires a day but by a handful of catastrophic events – each capable of knocking out a region’s entire waste treatment capacity. That is exactly why funding prevention alone is not enough: a mechanism is also needed to secure recovery after a major fire.

Three demands: not new, but now backed by numbers

FEAD warns that without effective countermeasures, battery-related fires will keep rising as more batteries are placed on the market. The association is therefore calling on EU policymakers to take three steps:

• A Battery Fire Prevention and Recovery Fund, financed through extended producer responsibility (EPR) for batteries and electronic devices, supporting both prevention and rebuilding after fires.
• A deposit return system for fire-prone batteries, to improve separate collection and keep batteries out of mixed municipal waste and other recycling streams.
• A ban on disposable products containing batteries, such as single-use vapes, which create unnecessary fire risks at the end of their life.

These demands are not new. Almost the same three points were made in May 2025 by eight European organisations – FEAD among them – in a joint position paper, which we described in our article on MiReHu’s vape count. In Germany, the closing declaration of the federal environment ministry’s round table committed to examining a fire protection fund, and the German fire study set out in detail what a producer-funded fund could pay for. What is new is the numbers: FEAD has put an EU price tag on the problem for the first time.

Of the three instruments, the fund could be implemented fastest, because it can build on existing producer registration and volume reporting and requires no product labelling or return infrastructure. A deposit system would be more effective but slower: as we noted in our analysis of the German study, the European Commission only has to assess the feasibility of battery deposit systems by 31 December 2027.

The tighter rules of the EU Battery Regulation – raising the collection target for waste portable batteries to 63 per cent by the end of 2027 and 73 per cent by the end of 2030, and the replaceability requirement applying from 18 February 2027 – will only take effect gradually, over product life cycles. Several member states have introduced or are introducing bans on disposable vapes, but there is no EU-wide ban yet.

What does this mean for Hungary?

FEAD’s figures quantify a problem that Hungary does not measure in a uniform way. There is no regular national register of fires in waste management. From the Hungarian National Directorate General for Disaster Management’s incident map, a total of 36 fires at waste management facilities could be identified for the April–September months of 2025 and 2026. If FEAD’s one-in-ten ratio is even roughly indicative, the real number of incidents may be several times higher.

On ignition sources, we do have our own data. MiReHu’s sorting-line count suggests that around 4.3 million discarded vapes may end up in Hungarian bins every year, roughly five per collection round. And that is vapes alone: the Austrian figure of around 70 lithium power sources per truck shows that toothbrushes, toys, earphones and power banks also travel under the compactor blade alongside them.

Three lessons follow from FEAD’s message for the Hungarian system:

• No management without measurement. Without a fire register based on a uniform definition, neither the scale of the problem nor the effect of a future fund or deposit system can be demonstrated.
• Cost-sharing belongs in the producer responsibility system. An EU fund would also affect Hungary’s EPR scheme, but in the meantime it is worth considering how producers could contribute to the domestic fire protection burden.
• The cheapest fire protection starts at home. Anything rechargeable, or that sings or flashes, belongs neither in the residual nor in the yellow packaging bin – and this communication must be funded continuously until EU rules take full effect.

The bottom line

FEAD’s estimate matters not because it reveals a new phenomenon, but because it gives EU scale to what German, Austrian, Dutch, Belgian and Norwegian data had already shown separately. Thirty fires a day, €2.66 billion in annual damage, and a burden borne almost exclusively by waste operators, while the public never hears about nine in ten of the fires. The association’s three demands – a producer-funded fund, a deposit system and a ban on disposable battery products – now reach EU policymakers backed by hard numbers. The question is whether the response will keep pace with the growth of the battery market, or whether fires will grow faster than regulation.

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Frequently asked questions: battery fires in Europe

How many battery fires were there in the EU waste sector in 2025?

FEAD estimates around 10,900, or roughly 30 a day. That is about 60 per cent of the sector’s estimated 17,500 fires. The number rose by 27 per cent in two years, from around 8,600 in 2023. The real figure is probably higher, because small fires extinguished on site are rarely recorded and countries define fire incidents differently.

How much damage do battery fires in Europe cause?

According to FEAD, they caused around €2.66 billion in damage to the EU waste sector in 2025 and roughly €7.3 billion over 2023–2025. On top of this, the sector invested around €730 million in fire prevention in 2025. These costs currently fall almost entirely on waste operators, while insurance is becoming more expensive and harder to obtain.

Why do most battery fires never become public?

Because the vast majority are extinguished on site by waste workers, without the fire service. FEAD estimates that of around 10,900 battery fires in 2025, only about 1,100 became publicly known, meaning nine more for every fire that makes the news. In Norway, the fire service was needed for only 4 per cent of fires in 2025.

What measures is FEAD calling for?

FEAD asks EU policymakers for three steps. The first is a Battery Fire Prevention and Recovery Fund financed through extended producer responsibility for batteries and electronic devices. The second is a deposit return system for fire-prone batteries, and the third is a ban on disposable products containing batteries, such as single-use vapes.

What do FEAD’s figures mean for Hungary?

They show that Hungarian waste operators face the same risk, which the country does not measure in a uniform way. There is no national fire register, and public data show only the tip of the iceberg. MiReHu’s count suggests around 4.3 million vapes may end up in bins each year, roughly five per collection round, making producer cost-sharing and household sorting key issues.

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🔗 Official sources and references: 👉

• FEAD: Battery fires cost the European waste sector more than €2.6 billion a year (3 November 2026)
• FEAD press release as PDF (3 November 2026)
• BDE: Brände in Entsorgungsanlagen nahezu verdreifacht
• VOEB: Lithiumbatterien – 70 potenzielle Brandherde pro Müllwagen
• Norsk Industri: Brannstatistikk
• ARIA database (BARPI, France)

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