Exeter Bin Lorry Fire: Printer Battery Shut Pinhoe Road

Pinhoe Road was closed during the morning rush hour on Wednesday after a fire started inside a recycling lorry. The suspected cause was a lithium battery sealed inside a printer cartridge that had ended up in the recycling.

The crew spotted smoke coming from the back of the lorry while they were still on their round. They ran the vehicle’s compacting mechanism to starve the fire of oxygen, parked up and called the fire service. Firefighters told them to eject the whole recycling load, then put it out. (Exeter City Council, 27 August 2026)

Nobody was hurt. The lorry suffered what the council calls minor damage. The road had to stay shut while the fire was dealt with and the ejected waste was cleared.

What the council said

Cllr Ruth Williams, deputy leader and lead councillor for support services and city management, praised the crew.

“Thanks to them, nobody was injured and the vehicle suffered only minor damage,” she said. “They did what they were trained to do, but it could have been prevented by someone thinking more carefully about what they threw in the bin.”

She described what happens to a battery once the lid closes. “It enters a system where it can be crushed, punctured and damaged, potentially triggering a fire within seconds. The danger is particularly acute when items containing batteries are hidden inside recycling loads. By the time a battery is discovered, it is often already moving through machinery, having been compacted inside a vehicle full of flammable material.”

Her conclusion was a rule, not a request: “Batteries, vapes and small electrical items must never be placed in household mixed recycling bins.”

This is not Exeter’s first. The council says a battery inside a discarded vape caused around £25,000 of damage to one of its collection vehicles last year.

The scale of it nationally

The council’s warning matches what the electricals recycling body Material Focus has measured. In May 2024 it reported more than 1,200 battery fires in the UK waste system over the previous 12 months, against 700 in 2022, a rise of 71%. (Material Focus, 10 May 2024)

The reason the number keeps climbing is that lithium cells are now inside things nobody thinks of as electrical. The council’s list runs from phones and headphones to power tools, toys, e-bikes, printers and vapes. A printer cartridge was enough to shut a main road into Exeter for a morning.

Where batteries actually go in Exeter

The council’s own A-Z of recycling gives one line for batteries: “Return these to a battery retailer (they are recycled under producer responsibility legislation) or take them to a recycling centre.” (Exeter City Council, A-Z of recycling, waste and materials)

Shops that sell electricals, vapes included, have to offer take-back. Beyond that, the two Devon County Council recycling centres inside the city both take household batteries, vapes, printer cartridges and small electricals:

Neither site takes electric vehicle or solar storage batteries. Winter hours run from October: 9am to 4.30pm on weekdays and 10am to 4.30pm at weekends.

Exeter’s own recycling banks around the city are for glass, shoes, cartons and textiles only, so they are not the answer for a dead battery. (Exeter City Council, recycling banks in Exeter)

What it means for you

The practical point is narrow and worth acting on. Anything with a cell in it, including the ones you cannot see, comes out before the bin goes out. That covers vapes, cables with a battery pack, light-up cards, toys, and cartridges with a chip and a cell inside.

If a battery does end up in your green bin and you notice before collection day, take it out rather than hope. Once the lorry has compacted it, nobody can.

Collections across the city run a day late all next week because of the bank holiday, so bins will be out on different days from usual. Our Exeter bin collection days page has the full shifted timetable and what each bin does and does not take.