The environmental cost of vaping

A few months ago I wrote a piece for The Spectator about the surge in popularity of Elf Bars and the potential health risks of these colourful e-cigarettes. But disposable vapes are now posing a different kind of problem – for the planet. 

These single-use devices, which last for around 600 puffs, head straight to landfill after users suck out their smoke. The vapes which don’t make it to the dump can be found lining the gutters of our cities, having been cast aside.

In Britain an estimated 4.3 million people use vapes today, up from around 800,000 a decade ago, according to YouGov data. And more than a third of all vapes bought last year were disposable, with this figure rising to more than half among 18-to-34 year olds, according to research by Material Focus and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. That study found 1.3 million are thrown away in the UK each week – the equivalent of two vapes every second.

But these e-cigs are packed with precious metals such as lithium. One vape contains an average of 0.15g of the stuff. Lithium is an essential building block of the modern digital economy; it is used to make car batteries among other things and it's one the rarest resources on the planet. Despite this, tonnes of it is being ditched because vapes such as Elf Bars and Geek Bars are branded ‘disposable’.

This means that when we toss out 67.6 million single-use vapes per year, we are also throwing away ten tonnes of lithium. That’s enough to make batteries for 1,200 Teslas. When we discard these brightly coloured bars, we are also discarding one of the most precious materials on earth.

Justin Greenaway, commercial manager at Sweeep Kuusakoski, a waste electrical and electronic equipment recycling facility, said most disposable vapes end up in landfill or the incinerator. He told ITV: ‘There's lithium in the lithium battery that we want to be making new cars out of, and all of that is becoming rubbish and not being reused.’

We have a product containing rare, expensive materials which is being sold as a cheap, disposable item. By 2040 the International Energy Agency expects demand for lithium to grow to more than 40 times its current level. And the appetite for new lithium extraction – an energy intensive process – can be blunted by boosting recycling rates. 

So it's important these things are recycled – and vape firms have a duty to encourage users to do so. They should be marketed as recyclable. Campaigns to raise awareness of that fact should be launched. And reward schemes for vapers to recycle should be implemented.

Every single-use vape can and should be recycled. Think about that next time you finish sucking on one.