Russ WareVaping has provided a healthier alternative to tobacco for millions of smokers. It’s hard to argue with the benefits of significantly less harm to our lungs, cleaner air, and fewer butts littering the streets. But as vaping’s popularity has soared, so too has its environmental impact, particularly from the hundreds of millions of single-use e-cigarettes sold each year.
While convenient and enjoyed by millions, disposable vapes are undoubtedly adding to an already huge e-waste problem. It’s a problem that is increasingly being highlighted in the discussions about banning disposables in countries around the world, only slightly behind the concerns over their use by teenagers.
But just how big a problem is vaping for the environment? Are disposables just the latest bogeyman of environmentalists, like plastic drinking straws and Q-tips were a few years ago, or is it truly something that our governments and the vape industry need to urgently tackle?
The Rise of Single-Use Vapes
The first e-cigarette devices arrived in the United States and Europe in around 2006-07, and the first disposable devices appeared not long afterward. These early devices, such as the Exhale produced by a company called Smoking Everywhere, didn’t make much of a dent in a market dominated by cig-a-likes and battery mods.
Vaping remained a niche alternative to smoking for several years, until the launch of the Juul in 2015 by Pax Labs. Although Juul wasn’t a true disposable, it was the first widely popular e-cigarette that featured disposable cartridges and undoubtedly paved the way for the development of the single-use vapes that are so popular today.
One of the first popular single-use vapes was Puff Bar, launched in 2019. Within two years, the brand known for its brightly-colored disposable vapes was the second-most popular in the United States. 2021 saw the launch of Elf Bar, which quickly rose to become one of the best-known and most popular disposable vape brands in the world. Elf Bar generated sales of $271 million in the U.S. during 2023 (even without marketing authorization by the FDA) and a staggering £654 million ($874 million) in the U.K. Based on the average cost per device of £5, that’s 130 million individual devices being used and discarded, from one brand, in a single year.
There are now hundreds of brands selling single-use vapes, and many sell nothing else. Aside from Puff Bar and Elf Bar, popular disposable vape brands include Esco Bar, IVG, Elux, Pulse, Flum, Lost Mary, and Breeze, to name just a few.
What Materials Are Used in E-Cigarettes?
E-cigarettes, reusable and disposable, are constructed from a variety of materials designed to meet specific functions such as durability, safety, and performance. The primary materials and components include plastics, metals (such as aluminum and stainless steel), microchips, and lithium batteries.
1. Plastic
One of the most common materials used in both disposable and reusable e-cigarettes. The body, mouthpiece, pod/cartridge, and sometimes the outer casing can be made from hard, durable, lightweight plastics. In disposable vapes, plastics are often used for the cartridge (where the e-liquid is stored) and the mouthpiece. These plastics are typically non-reactive to prevent contamination of the e-liquid.
Even if you don’t use disposable vapes, your vaping habit will still produce plastic waste in the pods and bottles of e-liquid you use to fill your tank or pods. This will be even more pronounced if you’re in a country that limits bottle size to 10ml.
The impact of plastic on the environment is well-documented, and single-use plastics have long been highlighted as a particular concern. Plastic lasts almost forever, breaking down into smaller and smaller parts until it infuses every part of life. Needlessly adding more plastic waste, which must add up to hundreds of thousands of tonnes, is certainly not a desirable situation.
2. Metals
Aluminum or zinc alloy is frequently used in reusable vapes, especially for the body or casing of the device. Metals like these provide strength while keeping the weight manageable, making it a popular choice for many refillable vapes. Stainless steel is also often used, both in components of the shell and the atomizer coil.
The internal components of both types of e-cigarettes include small circuit boards and microchips, used to control and regulate the device’s performance, battery life, and safety features. These control boards contain small amounts of copper and other metals.
Metal is widely recycled in many countries, but because it is so intricately mixed with non-recyclable or hazardous materials in an e-cigarette, the difficulty and cost of extracting and recycling the metal means vapes are not commonly allowed in recyclable metal waste and are more likely to end up in landfill sites.
3. Lithium
Most e-cigarettes use lithium-ion batteries, which are lightweight yet powerful, making them ideal for portable devices. One of the major concerns about the huge increase in the use of disposable vapes is the amount of lithium being wasted. Lithium batteries are everywhere in modern life, but most are inside devices designed to be recharged and used for a long time.
A 2022 report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that five disposable vapes were thrown away every second in the United States. That amounts to 150 million devices annually, or enough lithium to build batteries for about 6000 Teslas.
In the UK, a 2023 study by Material Focus found that more than 5 million single-use vapes are thrown in the trash each week. Even though there is only 0.15g of lithium in the average disposable, that still amounts to around 30 tonnes of this valuable material being discarded annually for a little bit of vaping convenience.
Lithium batteries are considered hazardous waste due to their potential toxicity to the environment and the risk of combustion when crushed or damaged. Studies suggest that there were 1200 fires in refuse trucks and waste plants in the UK in 2023, up from 700 the year before. Although not all of these are attributed to vape batteries, it seems likely the increase is linked to the rise in disposable vape use and the number being thrown away.
How Lithium is Extracted from the Environment
Lithium is listed by many countries as an “essential metal” and will be incredibly sought after if nations want to move away from fossil fuels soon. Lithium is commonly extracted using one of two methods: mining from hard rock or extracting from brine (saltwater).
Hard Rock Mining: In this method, lithium is mined from rocks, specifically a type of mineral called spodumene. The rock is crushed, heated, and treated with chemicals to extract lithium. This energy-intensive process requires large amounts of water, which can strain local water resources. Lithium mining can significantly alter landscapes, leading to habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity, and the chemicals used in processing lithium can leak into the soil and nearby water sources, potentially harming plants, animals, and local drinking water supplies.
Brine Extraction: This method involves pumping underground saltwater (brine) into large ponds, usually from salt flats or lakes. The water is left to evaporate in the sun over months to years, concentrating the lithium. The remaining liquid is processed to separate the lithium from other salts and minerals.
Both methods can have a considerable impact on the immediate environment and the energy used in mining and processing lithium, especially when done with fossil fuels, contributes to carbon emissions, adding to climate change concerns. It could certainly be considered wrong to increase this environmental damage just to make a battery that will be used for a day or two and then thrown away.
Smoking and Tobacco Industry Waste
It certainly isn’t only vaping that is bad for the environment. Even today, when smoking rates are at the lowest they have ever been, there are more than a billion daily tobacco users in the world.
Smoking waste has been one of the most prevalent forms of plastic pollution worldwide for decades, with trillions of cigarette butts contaminating the environment annually. The filters in modern cigarette butts have been composed of synthetic plastic almost since their introduction in the 1950s. When discarded into soil or water, they release toxic chemicals before breaking down into microplastics.
And it isn’t only discarded butts that are an environmental problem. A 2018 study on the environmental impacts of the tobacco industry found that the six trillion cigarettes manufactured each year globally take up some 5.3 million hectares of land and their production requires more than 22 billion tonnes of water. It also produced 25 megatons (million tonnes) of solid waste, 55 megatons of wastewater, and almost 84 megatons of CO2 emissions.
How to Reduce the Environmental Impact of Vaping
No electronic device is ever likely to be completely harmless to the environment. Even if disposed of responsibly for recycling (which also uses energy and produces CO2), there will be an environmental cost to sourcing and manufacturing the materials used in its construction. However, there are choices you can make to reduce the environmental impact caused by your vaping.
1. Switch From Disposables to a Refillable Vape
Switching from single-use disposables to any other type of vape is a great start. While battery mods or pod mods that use replaceable coils (rather than single-use pods) are likely to produce the least waste, anything with a rechargeable battery is better than a disposable vape. Lithium batteries in refillable vapes should be good for several months to more than a year with careful use. Switching to a refillable vape will also save you a significant amount of money.
The choice to use disposable vapes is being taken out of the hands of consumers in many countries. Bans on the sale of single-use vapes have been introduced or are planned in Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Argentina, Brazil, Norway, India, Turkey, and several others. In the United States, only a handful of disposable vapes have been granted marketing authorization by the FDA.
There are many excellent reusable and refillable pod vapes out there; why not reduce your environmental impact and see which one is right for you?
2. Buy E-Liquid Produced Locally
While China dominates the manufacturing of both disposable and refillable e-cigarette devices, e-liquid brands tend to be more localized.
It is often not too difficult to find vape juice that is produced in the country where you live, and by choosing to use those liquids you will be reducing your carbon footprint. It might only be a small step, but surely it’s better to buy “local” rather than use a consumable product that has been shipped halfway across the world?
3. Dispose of Your Vapes Responsibly
Sadly, the options for disposing of e-cigarettes responsibly are lacking in many countries. Where household waste needs to be separated before collection, you might have the option to dispose of batteries and small electrical devices. This can include refillable vape batteries but is unlikely to include disposables. Some countries, such as the UK, have mandated that vape stores must accept used single-use vapes for recycling, so it is worth looking into specific vape recycling options where you live.
The Bottom Line
Choosing to vape instead of smoking tobacco is a great choice, but if you are even a little environmentally conscious, there are good vaping and bad vaping choices. The waste of lithium attributed to single-use vapes is becoming a real problem, as is the extra plastic waste. While a reduction in the number of discarded cigarette butts is a good thing, replacing them with discarded plastic and lithium isn’t.
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