Spike in recycling plant fires raises safety concerns — and one expert says vapes may be to blame

Last month, a massive fire erupted at the Omnisource recycling plant in Kernersville, sending towering plumes of black smoke into the sky and drawing attention from as far away as Virginia. The blaze burned for more than a day, injured a firefighter, and raised fresh concerns about fire safety at recycling facilities — which experts say are increasingly prone to such incidents.

The fire triggered alarm bells for Stan Meiburg, a former Environmental Protection Agency deputy administrator and current Wake Forest University sustainability professor. He says the unusually high plume resulted from the kinds of materials being burned.  

“Main things you get in there are things that don't burn completely,” he says. “It's why you get these big black plumes of smoke. They can include plastics or fabric or material like that.”

Meiburg says when they’re burned, these materials create what’s called particulate matter pollution.

“The greatest risk that we worry about for particulate matter are longer term exposures. So the fact you had a fire for only a couple of days, and that a fair amount of the plume went up into the atmosphere is helpful in a sense that it disperses,” he says. “Now, the advice you get from the fire department, which is, stay away, stay indoors until the fire is out, is pretty good advice.”

The fire’s cause remains undetermined, but it’s far from the first time officials have dealt with a blaze at the plant. Public records show the fire department has responded to the facility more than two dozen times in the last five years. Meiberg says that’s something to take note of. 

“Well, if I were a neighbor, and if I were the local community, the fact you had a number of fires would at least make me ask questions about, is the facility doing the right things to make such events less likely to occur?”

It’s a question that Ryan Fogelman is pretty familiar with. He leads Fire Rover, a company that provides remote extinguishing systems to plants like Omnisource, to stop fires before they get out of hand.  He’s spent the last few years collecting data on similar blazes, trying to figure out how to best manage them. 

He says it’s an inherent risk of processing materials like cars and aerosol canisters, though most of these fires are small and contained quickly. Ideally, he explains, plants like this would be constructed far away from residential areas. But development has encroached over the last few decades. 

“So now these are becoming your neighbors,” he says. “And again, you have no idea they're there, but they've been there longer than you.” 

Overall though, the number of incidents across the industry is growing. Publicly reported recycling plant fires increased by nearly 60% between 2016 and 2024. 

Fogelman says there’s a major driver of the trend: vapes.

Millions of them are funneling into recycling plants and landfills each year. Even the ones marked disposable contain lithium-ion batteries, which can spark blazes that emit toxic smoke and are difficult to put out. He estimates that over half the fires his company deals with are related to these batteries. 

“People just throw them in the waste and so you tell them, ‘Hey, don't put it in recycling.’ Great. Well, where am I supposed to put it? And so there's not enough drop off locations.”

The EPA recommends disposing of used vapes at hazardous waste facilities — not in household trash or recycling bins.

But not all of them accept e-cigarettes, including the one in Forsyth County. Some vape shops have their own recycling programs, but that appears to be pretty rare. WFDD found just one in the Triad.