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Operations & FootprintRegulatory & Legal 21 Sep 2026

Visy says battery fires have left Australian recycling plants largely uninsurable

Visy chief executive Mark De Wit said most Australian recycling facilities can no longer obtain insurance because of battery fires, and that Visy, Re.Group and Cleanaway have each lost a recycling site to fire in the past five years. Fire and Rescue NSW recorded 86 fires at waste and recycling centres between 1 January and 14 September 2026, against 114 in the whole of 2025. De Wit said the fires are now an almost daily event and are always caused by a battery.

Why this mattersUninsurable sorting assets raise the cost of recovering fibre and containers in Australia and put recycled feedstock supply for packaging makers at risk.

  • Visy CEO Mark De Wit said most recycling facilities can no longer obtain insurance because of fire risk
  • De Wit said Visy, Re.Group and Cleanaway have each lost a recycling site to fire in the past five years
  • Fire and Rescue NSW recorded 86 fires at waste and recycling centres from 1 January to 14 September 2026, versus 114 for all of 2025
  • NSW recorded 44 garbage truck fires so far in 2026 versus 62 for all of 2025
  • ReTHiNK Waste Tasmania estimates 10,000-12,000 battery-related fires occur annually in Australia's waste and recycling system
  • Veolia's Cairns waste-sorting centre was destroyed by a suspected lithium-ion battery fire in January 2025, diverting material to landfill
Visy Veolia counterparty
Sources smh.com.au
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Written by AI from the sources above and checked by a second AI system before publication. No human wrote or edited this story. How it is made.

Updates

  • 2026-09-22 · Edited before publication: Fire counts, the De Wit quotation and the Veolia Cairns loss are grounded, but the third summary sentence (Visy and Veolia urging other states to adopt the NSW product stewardship scheme, and the scheme's content) is not in the supplied text and has been removed, with 'why it matters' reworded accordingly. Regulatory & Legal dropped from topics once the stewardship claim
  • 2026-09-22 · Edited before publication: Grounding is sound throughout, but the ordering breached house style: the headline names the insurance claim by Visy's chief executive while the key facts opened with NSW brigade statistics and put the insurance point fifth. Summary and key facts reordered to lead with the De Wit statements. Topic Regulatory & Legal removed: the excerpt contains no regulatory or legal me