Communities can't recycle or trash disposable e-cigarettes. So what happens to them?
Communities can't recycle or trash disposable e-cigarettes. So what happens to them?
Communities across the U.S. are confronting a new vaping problem: how to get rid of millions of disposable e-cigarettes that are considered hazardous waste.
For years, the debate surrounding vaping largely centered on its risks for high school and middle school students enticed by flavors like gummy bear, lemonade and watermelon.
But the recent shift toward e-cigarettes that can’t be refilled has created a new environmental dilemma. The devices, which contain nicotine, lithium and other metals, cannot be reused or recycled. Under federal environmental law, they also aren’t supposed to go in the trash.
U.S. teens and adults are buying roughly 12 million disposable vapes per month. With little federal guidance, local officials are finding their own ways to dispose of e-cigarettes collected from schools, colleges, vape shops and other sites.
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Deposits work for my milk bottles they could work for vapes if you made them high enough. Also another barrier to kids accessing them if they have to pay a deposit every time.
Should just ban disposable vapes imo. They only get people into vaping, they don’t help quitting smoking cigarettes better that reusable vapes.
That'd be great except the FDA decimated the market outside of disposables. I now only have 1-2 shops in my (250k pop.) city selling juice, coils, mods, and batteries all with pretty limited selection and wildly high prices, where previously I could order from one of hundreds of companies online at dirt cheap prices. Most corner stores still have a full selection of cigarettes and disposables though.
People hate bans on things though; the hassle of being forced to properly dispose of the devices would be enough discouragement to lessen the amount of providers.
Prohibition. Does. Not. Work.
The ban is not on vaping, just disposable vapes. Anyone who wants to vape can still get a regular one.
It’s not prohibition, it’s regulation.
I can't see this working with disposables as you'd have people bringing in devices of unknown condition and piling them into a bin full of lithium batteries. That's how you wind up burning your store down.
Yes the disposal would be a hassle but that is the point. It would discourage businesses from carrying the devices if they had to handle returning them as well.
It's not so much of a hassle as it is a danger and I don't think places like Circle K or your local corner store should be penalized for selling a perfectly legal product nor should their untrained employees be forced to handle potentially dangerous materials. If anything, the manufacturers of these products should be penalized and forced to come up with a solution to the problem.
Some stores have this now in the US via the Call2Recycle program from the RBRC. They were started to offer a convenient way to recycle NiCd batteries, but they take lithium batteries, and cell phones now as well. I've taken in batteries out of "disposable" vapes before (did the disassembly myself though, so they basically looked like any other small lithium battery). Definitely understand the concern about keeping a bin full of questionable batteries around while you wait for the box to be full enough to send in though, but there are plenty of stores where it's already a thing.