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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Before year 2000, I worked for a company with many subsidiaries, including one of the top three timber, pulp and paper companies in Australia.
Recycling was being pushed by pressure groups so as an educational and defensive matter we did detailed studies of the economics of recycling paper and cardboard. At the time (and probably this is still the case) paper recycling was not an economic proposition. The most favourable scenario depended on recycle of only paper that had not already been recycled once or more. In brief, damage to the paper fibres happened with each recycle. The only feed that worked well was mainly offcuts from original paper production.
Recycling of most goods as well as paper today depends partly on an enthusiastic populace working for free or low cost for ideology reasons. Use of government subsidies is seldom based on good recycle economics. Subsidies are there to help political election chances, at a cost to all taxpayers.
Australians must reorder their Life priorities away from putting “care for environment” at the top (as school children are often taught) and “putting food, clothing and shelter” at the top, as was taught for most of my long life. Geoff S
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European wokesters are going ballistic at Pete Hegseth’s D-Day comments, but he was 100% right.
I hope the Europeans enjoy their replacements.
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In June, the European Union appeared to finally react regarding immigration by introducing tougher border entry rules for the 27-nation bloc. The proposed rules are to ensure that illegal/undocumented migrants who enter the bloc are processed and, where necessary, quickly sent to deportation centers in countries outside the EU. People seeking asylum will be screened for identity, security, etc. The U.K., as yet, does not have offshore migrant holding centers.”
I’ve just read this reported on FOX News.
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Food, clothing, shelter and i would add energy and security in an increasingly problematic world
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In the UK instead of efficiently collecting waste and sorting the valuable stuff like metal and glass mechanically (like the films from the 1960s they showed us in school), we prefer 4 or more different rounds of diesel powered truck collections for general, garden, food, recycling, etc. And instead of incinerating the worthless waste cleanly for heat and power, we prefer to virtue signal, waste hours cleaning and sorting, before it is all collected, thrown into big heaps whilst wondering what to do, until it fortuitously catches fire and burns in the most polluting and wasteful way possible.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3rylvvdvvgo
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Interesting article on nuclear power development possibly coming on in Africa:
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2026/06/08/africas_nuclear_future_is_small_modular_reactors_1186842.html
200 MW SMRs are a better grid fit than the typically big power plant. Mind you at this point SMRs are something of a hype bubble. Worth watching.
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I don’t think Africa is developed enough to manage nuclear power, they can barely manage coal power.
But an ultra-low-maintenance (maintained by Western contractors), fully sealed and externally monitored (in a Western country) SMR that is simply trucked into place, connected to the grid, then removed and replaced in 3-30 years when its fuel is exhausted is a good idea. E.g. the fuel in Toshiba 4S or General Atomics EM2 SMRs is designed to last 30+ years.
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