When fire swept through Southern California, it left a trail of toxic waste in Los Angeles from such mundane possessions as vacuums, power tools and e-cars.
A car drives past homes and vehicles destroyed by the Palisades Fire at the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates on 12 January 2025, in Los Angeles, California (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
This article, by high school student Paolo McCarrey, was produced out of News Decoder’s school partnership program. Paolo is a student at The Thacher School, a News Decoder partner institution. Learn more about how News Decoder can work with your school.
Los Angeles, California has one of the largest economies in the world. It also has the largest concentration of electric vehicles in the United States. Los Angeles is my hometown and the same place where recent wildfires burned whole neighborhoods to the ground.
With the fires came the destruction of thousands of lithium-ion batteries in cars, electronics and kitchen appliances.
The fires started on 7 January 2025, and ended 24 days later. In October of 2025, police arrested a man from the state of Florida for starting the fire, but it was the near perfect environmental conditions that caused the fires to grow fast and move quickly. These fires are thought to have caused an estimated economic loss of between $28 billion and $53.8 billion, and have destroyed upwards of 16,000 structures.
The fires wreaked havoc on my local community for an entire month. Just miles from my house, I witnessed the destruction these fires caused. Entire residential street blocks lined not with houses, but with rubble. I saw people milling about in front of houses, and I watched one woman stare with a stone-cold look on her face at the remains of a house burned to ashes.
My family and many others were lucky we were far enough from the fires that we didn’t suffer any loss. Still, even those who didn’t lose their homes suffered from poor air quality.
“Our business was down 75% immediately after the fires,” said Leila Jersualem, a local business owner. “Because soccer is an outdoor activity, air quality was a frequent concern voiced by our families.”
Chemicals complicate cleanup.
The fires also caused the release of many chemicals into the air. One of the most dangerous chemical transmitters, it turns out, are lithium-ion batteries that release toxic gases when burned and can explode when lit on fire.
Due to this, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had to safely remove more than a thousand burnt lithium-ion batteries from homes and vehicles, among other places.
A schoolmate I interviewed at the time lived in the Pacific Palisades area. He told me he couldn’t enter his house due to toxic chemical residue from these destroyed batteries and other substances. He also didn’t think he’d ever move back in because of the dangers from these chemicals, which find their way onto household items and surfaces. Months later, he has still not moved back in.
Cleanup from the Los Angeles fires has become an arduous task. Chris Myers, a lithium-ion battery tech specialist for the EPA, told reporter Erin Stone in nonprofit news site LAist that to clean up the batteries special teams collect them in sealed containers and take them to places where they can be discharged into a saltwater brine solution that extracts any remaining energy.
The batteries are then crushed, and sent to a recycler who salvages critical minerals.
The dangers from batteries are global.
Myers told Stone that the heat from fires can cause a “thermal runaway” — the heat gets so intense that it causes a chemical reaction that creates more heat. When this happens, the batteries can emit toxic chemicals harmful to people in the area, and the chemicals, such as hydrogen chloride and hydrogen cyanide, can cause problems in the respiratory system.
If a lithium-ion battery catches on fire, anyone within 25 meters has to evacuate and move out of the danger zone.
Around the world, there were many incidents regarding the safety of lithium-ion batteries. In New York City, lithium-ion batteries were the leading cause of fire-related deaths in 2024. Additionally, lithium-ion batteries make up half of all garbage truck-related fires around the United States.
One of the largest lithium battery storage and power plants caught on fire in Northern California in January 2025. The nonprofit news site Politico found that, in France, the number of fires at waste facilities caused by lithium batteries in common household items doubled between 2019 and 2023. In South Korea, more than 22 people were killed from a lithium battery explosion in a factory south of Seoul in June 2024.
There are other problems with lithium ion batters. Conditions at lithium mines have raised some ethical questions, for example. In the U.S. state of Nevada, new lithium mines permitted by the Trump administration are preventing indigenous people from accessing sacred cultural areas, and raising fears of harm to drinking water and overall health of the local people.
Do the benefits outweigh the danger?
With all this danger, why are the batteries so prevalent in our homes? It is difficult to deny how useful they’ve been in humanity’s quest for clean energy.
When comparing lithium-ion batteries to the internal combustion engine, we can see that over a car’s entire lifetime, ones with lithium-ion batteries will contribute less of a carbon footprint.
It’s not far off to say that lithium-ion batteries have renovated our modern world.
But even though there are many positives to using lithium-ion batteries, such as renewable energy, they’re only a small part of the actual solution and there are some alternatives.
Vanadium flow batteries and sodium-ion batteries, for example, are considered viable alternatives to lithium-ion batteries. Sodium-ion batteries are faster to charge, and have a longer lifespan than lithium-ion batteries.
Weighing alternatives
The vanadium flow battery doesn’t decay and can contain the same level of recharge throughout the entire batteries’ lifetime. Also, unlike lithium batteries, vanadium flow batteries are non-flammable, making them much safer, especially in the event of fire.
However, like lithium-ion batteries, they take significant resources to make, and their environmental and social impacts are high.
When buying a car, getting a battery-powered car may be better for the environment, but consumers should be aware of the dangerous impacts of lithium-ion batteries.
The effects of these batteries are felt everywhere, some good and some bad. The implications of them in the Los Angeles fires, however, raise questions on how safe they are to people and the environment.
Further advancement of other parts of the climate solution must take place soon if we want to make a big impact in safer renewable energy.
Questions to consider:
1. What makes lithium-ion batteries dangerous?
2. What alternatives to lithium-ion batteries are there for electric cars?
3. What products do you use in your home that might contain a lithium-ion battery?
Paolo McCarrey is a staff writer at The Notes, the school newspaper of The Thacher School in Ojai, California, where he’s in his third year. When he’s not writing, he enjoys playing tennis, the drums and solving Rubik’s cubes.