Disposable Vapes.
You may have seen the headlines in the news lately about the damage done by batteries and electronics to waste facilities across the country, the waste industry claiming €50million in damage to trucks, and facilities and placing the blame on the massive increase in Vapes.
This comes as no surprise to VOICE supporters; you’ll remember as part of our campaign calling for a ban on single use vapes. We surveyed twenty retailers and found 100% did not know what to do with these WEEE waste items.
Recent estimates are that approx 30million are sold in Ireland every year, with very few if any collected in the weee collection points, instead ending up in general waste or, worse, littered in the environment.
In Ireland retailers are obliged to take back disposable, single-use, rechargeable vape and/or e-cigarette devices on a one-for-one, like-for-like basis. And you can put SU vapes into the blue battery recycling boxes (MyWaste has a great fact sheet here).
Electronics waste is the fastest growing waste stream in Europe at the moment, with screens and technology built into almost everything we use and becoming increasingly disposable. Vapes are the forefront of that, the canary in the mine. Electronics should be reusable, repairable, and properly collected in order to harness the materials that go into them and prevent more damage to the environment and our health. You can read a bit more about WEEE waste and how to avoid it in our blog.
We’ve highlighted the health, environmental and circular economy impacts of Single Use Vapes, and that is why so many of you signed our petition to ban them.
The government is slowly progressing the bill under a health remit along with restrictions on flavours and colours. The bill has now finished in the committee stages and is moving to the Seanad.
VOICE continues to call for a ban on Single Use Vapes, and this ban needs to be comprehensive. Vapes need to be demonstrably refillable and rechargeable. Not just sticking a charging port on the side that is never intended to work (as has been seen in the UK experience) or writing the word reusable on it (as we’ve seen with single use cutlery).
