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As I write this, I am vaping. I took up the habit a couple of years ago to help me give up smoking, which I had foolishly fallen back into while coping with the stress of caring for my terminally ill wife. The vape was supposed to be a temporary crutch while I weaned myself off nicotine altogether, but I am still at it.

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In that respect, I am not unusual. Most people who use vapes to quit smoking , largely because it is addictive, accessible and relatively safe compared with cigarettes. When I am working from home, I can hardly put mine down. I am now one of vaping in the UK 鈥� a lot of us are ex-smokers. I think it may be time to cut it out completely. There are increasingly compelling reasons to do so, and not just on health grounds. Vaping is also a growing menace to the planet.

The main problem is disposable vapes, which make up around a third of the tens of millions of vapes and refills bought every year (I have bought the odd one, but mostly use a refillable device). In the UK, disposable vape sales quadrupled between 2022 and 2023, and 5 million of them are thrown away every week.

These devices consist of a plastic tank for a nicotine-containing liquid, a mouthpiece, a battery and a heating element. They last for a relatively short period of time and are then waste. Their discarded corpses can be spotted littering the pavement outside pubs (or the sidewalk outside bars) where they have been casually tossed aside.

That, fortunately, isn鈥檛 the fate of most exhausted disposable vapes. A recent survey in the US found that about get rid of theirs in the trash. About 20 per cent keep their old vapes, probably unsure what to do with them. Only a handful do the right thing and recycle them.

In any event, the regular trash isn鈥檛 the correct place for an empty disposable vape. It is just a holding pen for more permanent removal to landfill, and the world already has more than enough plastic and electronic waste rotting away there. Plus they are increasingly designed to be recyclable, and though the availability of appropriate bins is behind the curve, these are springing up more and more.

Dumping a used vape has another major environmental downside. Their batteries contain valuable metals, such as lithium, which is increasingly in demand 鈥� and short supply 鈥� for the energy transition. In 2022, found that the disposable vapes sold in the UK every year contain enough lithium for 1200 electric vehicle batteries.

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And it isn鈥檛 just the afterlife of vapes that we need to worry about. According to a recent by Marta Lomazzi at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and her colleagues, producing and distributing them consumes energy and water, though how much has yet to be quantified. Rising demand for vapes may increase the amount of land needed to grow tobacco, the source of nicotine for e-liquids. The extraction and purification of nicotine from tobacco also requires a lot of water and produces non-recyclable toxic waste. 鈥淭he environmental impact of e-cigarettes presents a novel public health concern that needs to be urgently investigated,鈥� the team concluded.

There is a small upside, possibly: we have good evidence that the availability of vapes has reduced rates of smoking. That could at least make a small dent in the of plastic cigarette butts dropped onto the ground each year, which leach toxic chemicals and degrade into microplastics.

Nonetheless, the knee-jerk reaction is to ban disposable vapes. Belgium and France are in the process of doing just that, prohibiting 鈥減uffs鈥� on environmental as well as health grounds. But the evidence that this will achieve much is thin. In the 34 countries that have heeded the exhortations to ban or stringently restrict vaping to prevent young people from taking it up, rates of vaping than elsewhere. The black market just moves in to fill the void.

Enabling more recycling is a better option, and there is much room for improvement on that front. According to Laura Young at Abertay University in Dundee, UK, vapes come with clear recycling instructions and the infrastructure needed to dispose of them responsibly is still lacking.

But 鈥� assuming disposable vapes are here to stay 鈥� the most effective solution may be one borrowed from efforts to clean up cigarette butt pollution: make the producers pay. The European Union鈥檚 directive on single-use plastics will soon force this 鈥渕andatory product stewardship鈥� on makers of filtered cigarettes and loose filters. Why not apply this to vapes? The cost would probably be passed on to us poor saps who are hooked on them 鈥� but we all need another nudge to quit.