All around us we see it, the detritus of our modern 20th-century living – something our apparently less intelligent stone age ancestors never had to deal with. In our homes, in our gardens, on our city streets, in our countryside, our rivers, in the very air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat … are the minute and not-so-minute toxic droppings of our supposedly more intelligent technologically advanced superior societies.
Once upon a time we just climbed mountains, now we create summits of rubbish for other communities less rich and fortunate than our own. Mountains of cast-off clothes, cast-away plastic islands littering our oceans, discarded children’s toys useless and forgotten. mountains of car tyres all rotting and festering in someone else’s backyard. A year’s worth of cast-away electronic goods alone is estimated to weigh more than the Great Wall of China – more than 57 million tonnes.
To add to this tsunami of dubious exports, we have now invented a miracle of corporate health ingenuity to poison our own water sources on a grand scale. The vape! As if we weren’t doing a good enough job of poisoning ourselves, this devious and supposedly safe little gadget has been invented.
We will leave the health concerns for users of vapes, which are considerable, out of the equation for this article. It is the considerable health concerns for non-users that we will deal with here.
Vapes: an unrecyclable cycle
Vapes are a ticking time bomb for us all whether we use them or not. The toxic elements in vapes include cadmium, lithium, cobalt, nickel, lead, tin, aluminium, mercury, chromium, all toxic to living creatures. When I first started picking vapes up off our streets three years ago, the amount discarded was about 1.5 million per week. Now that number has ballooned to over 1 million a day in the UK alone.
The vast majority of these eight million vapes discarded every week, end up carelessly disposed of in drains, bins for landfills, on pavements, roads, verges and even in our beautiful countryside… which all will deteriorate and end up in ground water, rivers, streams, and if incinerated, into our air. Only a small proportion of them will be recycled.
A vape recycling facility in Huddersfield that Oliver Horn (the creator of our film Vape Nation) and I visited, is one of only five in the country that recycles vapes. It processes only 1.5 million a year. (It might be worthwhile reading this paragraph again to fully grasp its implications.)
Vapes vs recycling
There are many problems with recycling vapes:
- Hardly any outlets that sell vapes offer recycling services, even though by law they are obligated to do so. Fines for non-compliance are unlimited. As yet neither we, the recycler we visited, or anybody we have come across has ever heard of an outlet being fined.
- All recycled vapes need to be taken to pieces manually and split into their component parts for recycling. This is incredibly labour and time intensive. This is also complicated by the fact that there are so many different designs of vapes and manufacturers keep changing the designs. Each design requires a separate workstation.
- The ban on single use vapes is intended to make a huge difference but the reality is this will have minimal effect, because all vapes whether reusable or single use have rechargeable batteries as their power source. Manufacturers simply add a portal… if it can be recharged once it is a reusable vape. The more vapes manufacturers sell, the richer they become.
- A significant number of reusable vapes are virtually impossible to get into and recycle. This is not a recycling problem particular to vapes. Many other electronic goods are the same…it’s simply good for business.
So to recap: vapes in a nutshell
- Vapes are highly toxic and dangerous to us, our environment and to our children, grandchildren and subsequent generations.
- The laws covering vapes are not being adhered to and nobody seems to be enforcing them. Vendors are shamelessly ignoring the law – some pleading ignorance and others brazenly disregarding the law because there are no consequences for doing so.
- The people who do most to help solve this problem are selfless citizens who pick them up out of a sense of civic responsibility… unfortunately there are very few places to recycle them properly though.
- This problem is increasing, like a freight train picking up speed going faster and faster until at some point it is going to hit a corner, and it will be too late to do anything.
Action against Vapes
On Saturday 12 July at 9.45am, outside York Art Gallery exhibition Square YO1 EW7, volunteers, myself included, will attempt to bring attention to this impending but avoidable disaster by issuing 40 vape vendors with literature reminding them of their responsibilities and the possible consequences of not fulfilling them. We will then inform the relevant authority (The Office of Product and Safety Standards OPSS.enquiries@beis.gov.uk) and bring as much pressure as we can in order to encourage them to bring prosecutions against those not adhering to the law of our land.
If we as citizens of planet earth want a safer and more reliable future for our children, grandchildren and future generations, then we need to take responsibility now, not only for our own actions but also for the actions of others of our kind who seem to have only short-sighted, cynical, selfish, avaricious and destructive attitudes to life and the planet we all share. Over 40 countries have already risen to the challenge presented by vapes, and banned their sale; while in Australia, they have a prescription-sale only policy. Now is the time we all need to stand up and be counted, before even more damage is done.
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