The official disposable vapes sale and use statistics in the United States paint a gloomy picture. This is especially true if you consider the amount of waste these products generate. It is estimated that every second some young Americans through away five used disposable vapes.
The problem with the huge amount of disposable vapes being thrown away every day is that all these products are built with reusable lithium-ion batteries. If you compute all the statistics Americans throw away about 150 million disposable vapes. These products have enough lithium to build batteries for about 6,000 electric cars.
Lithium is a white powder used in 90% of rechargeable batteries found in electric cars, smartphones and a host of modern rechargeable electronic devices. The problem is that lithium is not readily available and the process of extracting it is quite complex. Already the price of lithium has been rising over the past few years and is expected to continue rising until 2025 when it is estimated the world will begin experiencing serious shortages of this rare mineral. With supply challenges already being experienced it was expected that at least many would be mindful of how they use products that contain this rare resource.
The Truth Initiative has been working to end smoking and vaping among young people for a couple of years in the USA. In a recent survey the initiative conducted, half of those who said had vaped had used a disposable vape. Furthermore, two third of those disposable vapes that were used were thrown in the household trash. Most of these products are built with rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. However, they are meant to be thrown away once used. This is where the problem of damping millions of useful lithium-ion batteries stems from.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), many people incorrectly dump their used vapes in household trash because these products are wrongly labelled “disposable”.
According to professor Alissa of the University of California Davis, the demand for lithium-ion batteries will grow fivefold in the next decade. This makes discarding disposable vapes with rechargeable batteries a terrible idea.
Other than the shortage of lithium, discarding these disposable vapes also present another problem for environmentalists. Lithium is toxic and has a high propensity for catching fire. For example, according to EPA reports about 245 fires occurring in waste facilities between 2013 to 2020 were directly attributed to lithium-ion batteries. There is a case of a lithium-ion battery-caused fire where four firefighters had to be rushed to hospital with serious chemical burns. It, therefore, goes without saying that disposing of products with lithium batteries in household trash is a safety risk.
According to Kendell, the US is yet to develop very good lithium recycling networks. This makes it hard for consumers to even know how to deal with small products with lithium-ion batteries such as vapes. EPA says that since 2021 it has been working to rectify the problem. It says that increasing effort to recover critical minerals including lithium from recycled products is one of its goals. However, it is expected that the problem will persist for longer as disposable vaping products are the most popular vaping products in the country, especially among the youth.
