🎉 Victory! In January 2024, the UK government announced a ban on disposable vapes – thanks in part to the nearly 250,000 of you who demanded action.
If you can, please donate to help keep up the momentum in our campaign against plastic pollution.
Vapes, or e-cigarettes, were originally produced to help people trying to quit smoking – and they still serve that important purpose. But single-use disposable vapes are growing more and more popular, and they’ve become one of the defining images of our throwaway culture.
Whether or not you vape yourself, we can all recognise the environmental issues with throwaway vapes:
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- They’re made from plastic (which is made from planet-wrecking oil).
- They create huge amounts of waste. The number of disposable vapes getting binned each year could fill 22 football pitches!
- Due to the way they’re made, disposable vapes are almost impossible to recycle.
- Disposable vapes waste valuable resources (that could be used for the green energy transition).
- The materials and chemicals used in vapes are potentially hazardous and pollute the environment.
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Thankfully, there is a solution! Let’s dive into why disposable vapes are such an environmental issue, and what we can do about it:
Why are disposable vapes so bad for the environment?
The biggest problem with disposable vapes is that they are, well, disposable. A market full of single-use products isn’t sustainable.
For every vape sold, there’s the production of plastic, mining for materials, shipping and packaging to sell it, and then we have to deal with the waste at the end of its life.
In the UK we bin nearly 5 million vapes each week – that’s roughly 8 vapes every second. That’s a huge amount of waste that has to go somewhere. Some enters the environment as litter, some goes for recycling, while the rest ends up in landfills.
Can vapes be recycled?
Disposable vapes are difficult to recycle because they’re made from a mixture of materials – including plastic, copper, and a lithium battery. They’re designed as one unit, which means the batteries can’t be easily separated from the plastic shell and other materials. This makes disposable vapes difficult and expensive to recycle.
The other problem with all single-use products is that we’re making more waste than we can cope with. Even if disposable vapes were easier to recycle, our waste management systems can’t handle the huge quantities of disposable vapes being thrown away every day.
