Refuse Vehicles, Waste & Recycling Centre Fires

WMFS OFFICIAL – NEW – FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST – FOI23034 

Ref: FOI/23034 

RE: FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 REQUEST 

I am writing to confirm that the West Midlands Fire Service has now completed its search for the information you requested further to your freedom of information request. 

Please find below a summary of our findings. 

Request 

 
We are interested in the number of fires in refuse vehicles and at waste and recycling centres.  I appreciate you may not have a specific code for this, and if not, it would be great if you could use a free text search for any terms you might think would capture this (e.g. waste centre, recycling centre, rubbish truck, refuse vehicle).  It would be great to have the data split by waste facilities and refuse vehicles, and broken down by the years 2020, 2021 and 2022. 

Reply 

Refuse Vehicle Fires: 

2020 – 3 

2021 – 5 

2022 – 3 

Recycling and Waste centres (incl. scrap yards) 

2020 – 22 

2021 – 20 

2022 – 33 

Please notes the following: 

The refuse vehicle fires have been identified by searching for key words within the incident log. These key words involved ‘bin lorry’, ‘bin truck’, ‘rubbish lorry’, ‘rubbish truck’, ‘refuse lorry’ and ‘refuse truck’.  

The recycling and waste centre fires were identified by searching for all fires under the property grouping ‘Recycling and Waste centres (incl. scrap yards)’. This means if a vehicle at these premises was on fire, then this would be a vehicle fire not a Recycling and Waste centre fire and would therefore not be included in the above figures. 

If you have any queries about this Freedom of Information request, please contact us. Please remember to quote the reference number above in any future communications.  

For service complaints, issues or comments regarding this request please contact The Public Relations Department, West Midlands Fire Service, 99 Vauxhall Road, Birmingham, B7 4HW 

Further information concerning Freedom of Information requests can be found on the Information Commissioner website at either the following link: https://ico.org.uk/ or at Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, SK9 5AF.