The Austrian waste, disposal and recycling industry has seen a sharp increase in fire incidents over the past years. The reasons for this include changes in the composition of waste, especially municipal waste. Incorrectly disposed waste fractions, such as batteries in residual waste bins, are also increasingly triggering such events. Within the scope of this master thesis, the development of fire incidents in the Austrian waste management sector and their causes were therefore investigated. For this purpose, incidents in the relevant sector that occurred in the period from November 2019 to October 2020 were collected from publicly available sources. Data of the collected fire cases were evaluated by fractions, aggregates but also by region. Spontaneous ignitions of waste fractions were explicitly considered, and their character was analysed in terms of temporal and seasonal occurrence. Among other perceptions, it was found that the occurrence of fire incidents is significantly higher in warmer months and, vice versa, significantly lower in colder months. This does not apply to spontaneous combustion, or only to a limited extent, since it was determined based on the data used for this master's thesis that spontaneous combustion does not differ significantly in its seasonal occurrence.