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.
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.