JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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Statistics
Nice little burner in London disrupting and endangering residents and emergency services personnel. Too early to identify cause but general consensus in comments is probably battery and most probably one in a vape.
AI comment on frequency of such events is:
UK – Over 1,200 battery-related fires occurred across UK waste and recycling facilities in the 12 months leading up to May 2024, representing a 71% increase from the previous year. Bedfordshire: The Elstow Waste Transfer Station suffered a major fire in July 2025, requiring six days to extinguish, while contractor Veolia reported 370 battery-related fires across its sites in 2025.
Australia – experiences a significantly higher volume of recycling and waste facility fires than the UK, with industry estimates placing the number between 10,000 and 12,000 fires annually in trucks and waste facilities.
Unlike the UK’s specific count of battery-induced incidents, Australian statistics often aggregate all waste fires, though authorities confirm that lithium-ion batteries are the primary driver of this surge.
Fire and Rescue NSW alone dealt with 384 lithium-ion specific incidents in 2024–2025, resulting in at least 33 injuries and multiple fatalities.
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Also, I wonder how much waste is economically recycled?
Things that are genuinely economic to recycle are probably steel and aluminium cans. The rest probably not although Australians are expected to provide vast amounts of slave labour judiciously separating their household waste into multiple streams.
Bottles have a 10c deposit but I suspect the cost of administering the scheme is huge and the sheer volume of bottles required to make a trip to a bottle deposit refund centre makes it not worthwhile. And for what? It was supposedly to stop littering but people in Western countries rarely litter anyway. It was just vacuous virtue signalling at huge cost with Other People’s Money. And the cost of drinks and other food items whose container bears a deposit went up much more than 10c when the scheme was introduced. Wokism always makes the poor suffer the most.
The best thing to do with waste after extracting the steel and aluminium is to burn it to produce power and/or process heat.
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Once again, Australia has shamefully proven to the world that it leads the world in suppressing freedom of speech because Herr Starmer in Once Great Britain wants to follow Australia’s ban on allowing children access to alternative opinions outside the Official Narrative on social media. E.g. criticism of anthropogenic global warming or that it is possible to change gender etc..
Like Australia, age verification for social media for childrem ultimately leads to age and ID verification for everyone including and especially adults, which is the true purpose as all Leftist Governments ramp up censorship of what opinions are considered unacceptable. It therefore allows the persecution, prosecution and silencing of anyone with unapproved opinions outside the Official Narrative, whether it be about Climate Change(TM) or whether unlimited open borders immigration is desirable or not etc..
In both Australia and UK people are already afraid to express opinions outside the Official Narrative.
Of course, the excuse is “to protect the children” but clearly that is a lie. Starmer himself as Director of Public Prosecutions in the UK never did anything to protect the children who were victims of the UK “grooming gangs” and the Left who promote these censorship policies do nothing to protect the children from the sterilisation and mutilation of atempted gender changes etc..
Discussion at: https://youtu.be/7hQKkOcgWc8
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Incidentally it was Australia’s fake conservative Liberal Party which introduced the censorious E Safety Kommissar and colluded with Labor to bring in censorship of alternative opinions on social media for under 16s and who have introduced or supported much other censorship legislation.
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