This is the contention of director of UK-based recycling NGO, Material Focus, Scott Butler.
He explains the reason: “Let’s take some of the most valuable materials on the planet that we really need for a greener future and put them in a cheap to buy addictive form of FastTech, sell them in their 100s of millions, market them as disposable and do next to nothing to meet our legal obligations to offer and finance the takeback and recycling of them.”
‘FastTech’ refers to everyday small electrical items, including headphones, cables, decorative lights and single-use vapes. They are cheap and have a short lifespan, so that they are seen as ‘disposable’.
The last government proposed legislation to ban the sale of disposable vapes and even proposed a date, April 2025. Then the election came.
Labour has been reported as being in favour of this measure, following a long and growing list of countries, including France and Belgium, and its implementation date. It is supported by the British Medical Association, which argues that disposable vape are displayed and marketed in a way that is appealing to children and teenagers – undesirable because their health effects are not known.
A brief history of e-smoking
Take the evidence of your local corner shop – the places where people buy fags and booze, often at antisocial hours. This invaluable and necessary part of the UK retail fabric has changed, a lot, over the past decade. You probably haven’t noticed because the process has been incremental.
The booze shelves are still well stocked but on shelves that once dispensed cigarettes you’ll now see row upon row disposable vapes in attractive little boxes available, legally, to over-18s. Their liquids contain throat soothing vegetable glycerine and a plethora of flavours, including mint, bubble gum, mango, crème brûlée or even old-fashioned tobacco.
E-cigarettes arrived in the UK from China in mid-2000s. The product arrived to fill a niche that was being created by tobacco control. The product took off rapidly as adult smoking rates declined – around a quarter of UK adults smoked then, today it’s 13%.
The percentage of a vapers, 11% of adults, will soon catch up with the declining smokers. According to pro-health charity ASH almost half of them also smoke and the same proportion have been vaping for more than three years.
Remember the early-2000s? Environmental health officers (EHOs) working for local authorities lobbied strongly for smoking control, against overwhelming opposition from the nicotine addicted and their powerful allies in big tobacco and retailing.
They were successful. Smoking was prohibited in virtually all enclosed workplaces and public places in 2007. The tobacco lobby had predicted mass civil disobedience. It didn’t happen. Most smokers, it transpired, wanted to quit. The ban was almost immediately accepted and normalised. EHOs rarely needed to enforce the rules. The restrictions, which had been portrayed as an outrageous infringement of civil liberties by the majority of newspapers, were self-enforcing.
E-cigarettes had a strong and totally valid argument on their side. They supplied a hit of nicotine without tar. Thus, they helped smokers to prolong their lives. On the one hand, their image was that of pharmaceutical products, like aspirins and corn plasters, on the other, they were rapidly adopted as accessories by hipsters. They had a DIY feel. It was an innocent and novel seeming fruit-flavoured rebellion, propelled on every high street by what would soon be called vape shops.
The disposable fire stick
The vaping market has changed since then and so has its implications for the environment and health. The reason? Disposable vapes, containing lithium-ion batteries, have been widely available in the UK for the past four years. They have come to dominate the vaping market, in one of the fastest moving consumer and retail trends of recent years.
In nicotine terms, one disposable vape is equivalent to 20 cigarettes, at a quarter of the price.
Young people are not vaping to give up smoking, but instead of smoking, and, in some case, are becoming nicotine addicted and damaging their lungs. This also applies to adult vapers. Vaping, increasingly, is no longer a way of stopping smoking, but a thing in itself. Not all vape additives are innocuous and medical science has not yet established what long-term vaping does to our lungs, so, at best, it is a gamble with human health.
I do not think that vaping should banned per se, merely regulated through effectively enforced retail and environmental legislation, and taxation. I believe that vapes should still be available to adults who want to stop smoking, on prescription.
The retail sale of disposable vapes certainly should be prohibited. China, the world's largest e-cigarette manufacturer, has outlawed the selling of fruit-flavoured vapes to children.
Menace of thrown away vapes
If the medical case that would discourage e-smoking is not yet fully proven, the environmental arguments for banning disposable vapes are overwhelming. According to research from Material Focus, in 2023, five million of them were being casually discarded each week in the UK a fourfold increase from the previous year. Thrown away vapes are a fire hazard, because of their batteries, and a shocking waste of resources.
Since 2023, says the charity, vape producers and retailers have not increased their compliance with environmental regulations. Sales of disposable single-use vapes are now at least 360 million per year in the UK and growing.
For all the disposable single-use vapes sold in the UK this would be equivalent to providing the lithium in the batteries for over 6,700 electric vehicles in the UK. Over 90% of vape producers and 90% retailers, says the charity, are not fulfilling their statutory obligations to provide and pay for recycling for vapes – there are supposed to be takeback bins in the shops where they are sold. Have you ever seen one?
Vape drop off points, it says, were available in 33% of 57 specialist vape retailers survey. However, high street brands and convenience stores provided very little or zero recycling drop-off points. It warns that, without immediate action on retailer takeback and recycling at least a quarter of a billion single-use vapes will be thrown away between now and the possible imposition of a ban next year.
Anticipating the ban, manufacturers have adapted vape design, offering products with a USB slot for battery re-charging. Elfbar and Lost Mary, sister brands responsible for than half of the UK’s disposable vape sales, have launched reusable versions.
Tough battle ahead
Even if a ban on selling disposable vapes is implemented in the UK, in the face of familiar claims in the newspapers that fervently apposed indoor smoking restrictions, invoking the weird spectre of a ‘nanny state’, it won’t offer a magic solution to the environmental problem. Butler says: “There might be a slight change, because, in theory, there will be fewer waste batteries, but there will still be issues with littering for the pod element of the devices.
He adds: “The devices will still be sold for a little as £5. This will give the message, reinforced now locked-in consumer behaviour that they are a cheap, throwaway item.”
An Elfbar spokesperson said: “We refute any suggestion that we are trying to circumvent proposed restrictions. We have worked with producer compliance schemes to ensure the costs of recycling vapes are met, and this is evolving due to the new waste electrical equipment directive requirements, which we support.”
EHOs played an essential role in making the case for and bringing about historic UK-wide tobacco legislation in 2007 and making it work. It was milestone in UK public health legislation, akin to the Clean Air Act of 1956. Vaping should not be prohibited across the board. but I think that we need to put the brakes on. The forces and interest groups in its favour are powerful and have deep pockets. It will be a tough battle.
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