Conor Walsh

Yes, Clare, there's quite a lot of issues.

If you're looking at what not to put in your bins at home, the two reasons, I suppose, one is health and safety, which is a very big one, and the other is recycling.

You know, certain things are recyclable, but they're not recyclable in your bins at home.

So we would encourage people to go to the right place with the materials.

Yeah, absolutely.

No batteries.

I mean, the lithium ion batteries are particularly dangerous and you get them in vapes as well as in a lot of things.

So anything, I mean, we've had so many fires in the waste industry.

We've had about eight in the last five years.

We could have 16 in the next five years if things don't improve for us.

And in fact, what people wouldn't know, I suppose, is that we're lucky we still have capacity to treat the dry recyclables that we collect because we've had three of those facilities are burnt down right now.

We had a new one came on stream just at the right time because if it didn't come on stream, we were short and we were going to have to export the dry recyclables because we wouldn't have enough capacity here.

Not all caused by batteries, but lithium batteries, lithium battery fires happen every day, every week at these facilities.

We see them, you know, so they're happening all the time.

They're mostly controlled.

The ones that get out of control burn down the plant.

But there are other issues like gas canisters.

Gas canisters can start fires and nitrous oxide gas canisters in particular are dangerous.

Yeah, I was hoping you wouldn't ask me that one, Claire, because I've asked three sorting plants this week and I'm getting different answers.

I mean, some say, look, when it's completely empty, they're not dangerous at all and they're happy to recycle them.