The Government has announced that it will be introducing legislation to ban the sale of single-use vapes in England from 1 June 2025. The Draft Environmental Protection (Single-use Vapes) (England) Regulations 2024 will allow businesses in England until 1 June 2025 to sell remaining stock and prepare for the ban. After that point it will be an offence to supply, offer to supply or possess with a view to supply, single-use vapes, with offences being punishable by civil and criminal routes.
This announcement comes after the Scottish Government recently published the Environmental Protection (Single-use Vapes) (Scotland) Regulations SSI 2024/269, which bans single-use vapes from 1 April 2025 in Scotland. However, the latest Government announcement suggests the ban will be aligned across all UK countries, so the Scottish ban may be moved from April to June 2025. In addition, the Welsh Government has confirmed that it will also follow England's decision and ban single-use vapes from 1 June 2025.
Although vapes and e-cigarettes are key in helping people to quit smoking, the vapes that cannot be refilled or recharged are becoming a serious environmental, safety and health concern. Many single-use vapes are casually thrown into general waste despite the fact they cannot be disposed of this way. This has led, in several cases, to fires in waste storage facilities and collection vehicles due to the lithium-ion batteries contained in them.
Some vapes that are not added to waste streams are littered, and those that do make it to recycling facilities have to go through a slow and difficult process to disassemble them.
It is estimated that in 2023, almost five million single-use vapes were littered or thrown away in general waste every week in the UK. This equates to roughly eight single-use vapes being discarded every second.
And whilst the potential environmental impacts are obvious, it is also a terrible waste of resources. The lithium within these vapes is a valuable resource but in 2022 more than 40 tonnes of it was discarded with single-use vapes, which is around the same amount of lithium used to power 5,000 electric vehicles.
Speaking about the ban, Circular Economy Minister Mary Creagh said, "Single-use vapes are extremely wasteful and blight our towns and cities. That is why we are banning single use vapes as we end this nation’s throwaway culture. This is the first step on the road to a circular economy, where we use resources for longer, reduce waste, accelerate the path to net-zero and create thousands of jobs across the country."
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