Brightly-coloured, disposable vapes are flooding the market, with millions ending up in landfill
A joint investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism along with Sky News and the Daily Telegraph has revealed the staggering environmental impact of cheap, disposable vapes that have flooded the market in the UK.
Single-use devices produced predominantly by brands such as Geek Bar and Elf Bar are diverting precious resources away from the high-tech economy and plugging them into single-use sticks that are being discarded at a rate of two per second, according to estimates.
This amounts to 10 tonnes of lithium being sent to landfill or waste incinerators each year – enough of the metal to make batteries for 1,200 electric cars.
It really is madness
“We can’t be throwing these materials away. It really is madness in a climate emergency – lithium is one of the things that is going to fuel the green economy,” Mark Miodownik, professor of materials and society at University College London, said.
“It’s in your laptop, it’s in your mobile phone, it’s in electric cars. This is the material that we are absolutely relying on to shift away from fossil fuels. We need to take care of every bit of lithium.”
Lithium demand for batteries is forecast to increase fivefold by 2030, it has been estimated. Producing the metal is a complex process that uses huge amounts of energy and water.
The challenge, according to Scott Butler, executive director of Material Focus, is that “somebody looks at [a vape] and doesn’t really think about what it’s made of, they think about what it does for them”.
Throwing vapes in the bin
Market research by Opinium for Material Focus, a non-profit recycling organisation, found 18 per cent of 4,000 people surveyed had bought a vape in the previous year. Of those, 7 per cent said they had bought a disposable device. This suggests around 168 million disposable vapes are being bought annually in the UK.
Just over half of users reported throwing their vapes in the bin when it runs out, rather than putting them in a waste electricals recycling bin, or returning them to the retailer.
“From producers through to us as consumers, we need to be more mindful in the decisions that we make, the products that we manufacture and the products that we buy,” said Butler.
“It needs to be made significantly easier for many people to do the right thing, because most people want to do the right thing.”
Children vaping
Concerns over the number of children that are vaping have also recently been raised in a study carried out by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) which shows social networking sites such as TikTok could be behind a meteoric rise in young people being attracted by e-cigarettes.
New ‘puff bars’ are appealing to younger people by using brightly coloured packaging and promoting flavours such as pink lemonade, strawberry banana and mango.
An Observer investigation found that these are being marketed heavily on TikTok in an apparent breach of advertising rules, leading to a “shocking” increase in non-smokers taking up e-smoking thanks to their low price point and wide availability.
The devices generally do not contain tobacco but come prefilled with a nicotine salt-based e-liquid containing 20 milligrams of nicotine per millilitre – the highest concentration permitted by UK law.
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