The wildfires that swept through Los Angeles County earlier this year were tragic, but in the wreckage lay a challenge for federal environmental officials that went beyond the initial conflagration: damaged lithium-ion batteries.
Fires left more than 13,500 houses and garages in ruins across the region, and once the fires were extinguished, the urgent need to manage potentially explosive batteries left in the debris was just beginning, according to an extensive report by Tech Xplore.
California leads the country in EV adoption, with about five times more electric cars than any other state, which means that, along with all the batteries from household electronics and smartphones, there were plenty of oversized vehicle packs to contend with.
The National Fire Protection Association said that "Perhaps no other technology is associated with such a confounding variety of hazards in one package."
When these types of batteries are damaged, they can go into thermal runaway — an unstoppable reaction where cells rapidly heat up and begin to spew toxic and flammable gases. They can burn with extraordinary heat and even "reignite like a trick birthday candle days or weeks later," as the NFPA put it.
"Just like pushing over that first domino ... it can spread," said Chris Myers, the co-chair of the EPA's national lithium-ion battery emergency response task force, per the report.
"We were pushed into a situation where we had to figure it out," Myers added.
Environmental workers recovered more than 16 times more batteries in the L.A. fires than they did when wildfires ravaged Maui in 2023, as Tech Xplore detailed. When the Biden administration was tasked with cleaning up damaged batteries, they had to develop new technology, as there were no battery recycling facilities on the island.
This led them to create a new two-step method for safer remediation, in which stored power is removed and the batteries are then crushed for safer transport.
First, batteries were dipped in a brine solution made of table salt and baking soda for three days to draw out their power reserves. This was followed by crushing them between a steel plate and a drum roller.
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Move somewhere else 🌎 Months later, the EPA switched to grinding machines made by an industrial fabricator in New Jersey, which were able to munch through debris eight times faster than their earlier method.
After their months-long efforts, the now safely transportable debris was loaded onto trucks and sent off to the Grassy Mountain waste disposal facility in Utah, the report concluded.
Lessons were learned and new systems developed to deal with this hazardous debris, which should prove useful as we move toward more sustainable methods of energy generation and storage.
Companies continue to improve recycling and recovery technologies to keep ecosystems safe and reduce the need to mine new materials. Challenges remain, but these innovations pave the way toward a cleaner, safer future.
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