Two fires involving discarded plastic waste from hotfix units broke out in Surat’s Puna area early Monday, exposing a growing safety risk after the Surat Municipal Corporation stopped collecting the material from units across the city. Surat Fire and Emergency Services contained both blazes, and no casualties or property damage were reported.
The SFES control room received a call at about 4.13am regarding a fire near Archana School in Puna. Firefighters reached the location and extinguished the flames before they spread to nearby properties. During the operation, the team found another fire approximately 500 metres away near a creek and launched a second firefighting operation.
The fires involved thin plastic sheets used in the hotfix process, in which rhinestones are applied to fabric. Once used, the sheets are discarded. Fire officials said hotfix units generate tonnes of this plastic waste daily and warned that the material is highly inflammable, allowing flames to spread rapidly.
The Surat Municipal Corporation had collected the waste from hotfix units for the past few years, although the plastic falls under a prohibited category, according to the report. That collection process has been discontinued over the past few months. Since then, unit owners have allegedly started dumping the material in open spaces at different locations across the city.
A fire official said it was suspected that some people may be setting the dumped waste alight. “It being a highly inflammable plastic, it immediately catches fire and burns within minutes,” the official said. The official warned that fires in such waste could damage nearby properties and lead to secondary incidents if flames spread.
The incidents also point to the difficulty of managing a waste stream generated by a concentrated industrial activity when collection arrangements change. Open dumping moves the risk from individual hotfix units to public spaces, roadside areas and locations near built-up neighbourhoods. In Puna, one of the fires was reported near a school and the other near a creek, placing the waste close to public and environmental receptors, although the report did not record any injuries or property loss in these incidents.
SFES officials said similar incidents had occurred in the past. In some cases, vehicles were damaged after fires broke out in heaps of discarded hotfix plastic waste. The repeated nature of these incidents makes the location and disposal of the waste a fire-safety concern as well as a municipal waste-management issue.
The latest fires were extinguished by SFES teams before they spread. The report does not specify whether the SMC has announced a replacement collection system, identified the dumpers or issued enforcement measures against open disposal. Those actions will determine how the city addresses the immediate risk from existing waste heaps and the continuing disposal of plastic generated by hotfix units.
