A proposal from the Environmental Services Association has been making headlines this week, and we wanted to share our honest thoughts on it.
In an article on the BBC, the ESA, representing the UK’s waste industry, is calling for a deposit of up to £5 to be charged on vapes at point of sale, refunded when customers return their device for proper disposal. Biffa, the UK’s largest waste company, has put the £5 figure on the table.
The argument behind it is straightforward: a year on from the disposable vape ban, the waste industry is still seeing hundreds of thousands of vapes arriving at facilities hidden in general rubbish every week, causing fires and sending valuable materials straight to landfill rather than recycling.
We understand where that frustration comes from. The scale of the problem is real. Weekly vape disposal figures have fallen since the ban came in, but only from around 8.2 million per week to about six million, according to the BBC. That’s still an enormous number, and the fire risk to bin lorries and waste processing plants is not something anyone in this industry should be dismissive about.
But a deposit scheme might not be the right lever to pull here, and Marcus Saxton, our CEO and Chairman of the Independent British Vape Trade Association, has been direct about why.
Source: BBC
The illicit market gets a free pass
The fundamental problem with a deposit scheme is that it only works if every retailer applies it. The retailers who aren’t abiding by their legal obligations today, whether that’s sourcing from the black market or simply ignoring existing rules, won’t apply a deposit either. It won’t be enforced against them. And when customers notice that buying from those sources means no deposit on top of the purchase price, some of them will take that route.
That is, as Marcus put it, “a complete disaster.” Not just for legitimate retailers like us, but for consumers who end up with unregulated products, and for the environment, since those sales come with zero accountability for what happens to the device afterwards.
Pricing pressure toward illicit retail is the last thing this industry needs right now.
What actually needs to happen
The answer isn’t to do nothing. Marcus has been clear that there is more to be done on recycling, and we agree. But the route to better disposal runs through legitimate retail, not away from it.
Every vape retailer should be offering a takeback scheme, and it should be clearly signposted. This doesn’t need to be complicated for a customer. “It’s not like you’re crawling through a hole to get there”, as Marcus put it. You’re entering a legitimate store, and those stores should be held to the standard of allowing customers to dispose of their products safely.
That obligation already exists in law, and the Environment Secretary, Emma Reynolds, acknowledged that the government intends to hold retailers to account where recycling bins are absent. That enforcement piece matters.
The collection infrastructure has to improve
When Marcus spoke to the BBC about whether more public collection points would help drive better behaviour, he pointed to the fact that some local councils have trialled kerbside collections in certain areas. It’s a start. But as he noted, there are more initiatives that need to take place to make disposal genuinely convenient for people.
Convenience drives behaviour. A deposit scheme is a financial nudge, but if returning a vape requires a special trip to a retailer or recycling facility that isn’t nearby, plenty of people won’t bother, regardless of the £5. The infrastructure conversation is just as important as the incentive conversation, and right now it’s getting less attention than it deserves.
Where the market is heading
Our own quarterly data shows 1.6 million month-on-month growth in high puff pod sales, which reflects a real and ongoing shift toward the reusable format. Customers are moving in the right direction, with refill sales now significantly outgrowing kit sales as users lean into recurring purchases.
Reusable devices, refillable tanks, rechargeable batteries: these are the products that address the waste problem at source, and adoption is growing steadily.
That shift doesn’t happen faster by making legitimate retail more expensive or more administratively burdensome than illicit alternatives. It happens when the regulated market is the obvious, convenient, trusted choice.
It is worth being clear on one thing: reusable vapes still usually contain lithium batteries, and a lithium battery crushed in a bin lorry does not behave differently because the device it came from was rechargeable.
What does change is frequency. Fewer devices being thrown away means fewer opportunities for things to go wrong, and that matters to waste facilities operating on tight margins with fire incidents still happening every week. But that is a reduction in pressure, not a solution.
The root cause here is not the vape format, it is the fact that people across the UK are still routinely putting electricals in general waste without understanding the consequences. That is an education problem, and until it is treated as one, redesigning the product will only ever get us so far.
The education problem
The vape disposal problem doesn’t exist in isolation. It sits inside a much wider e-waste crisis that the UK has been struggling to get on top of for years. The UK generates around 1.65 million tonnes of electronic waste every year, making it the second-largest e-waste producer per capita in Europe at roughly 24.5kg per person.
Despite some recent progress, over 400,000 tonnes of electricals are still thrown away annually in the UK, and over 500 million devices are hoarded across homes in the UK. The recycling picture is mixed: the official WEEE recycling rate sits at around 57%, though some analyses place the actual capture rate closer to 31%, highlighting how much still falls through the cracks.
The issue is not simply a lack of infrastructure, though that matters. It is a lack of awareness. Most people do not know that the cable they binned, the vape they discarded, or the earbuds they threw out last week contained lithium, copper, or gold, that they were legally required to dispose of them differently, and that doing so incorrectly can and does cause fires.
It’s also a waste of precious materials that have often been mined at great environmental cost. Recycling these materials, therefore has a two-fold benefit for the planet’s natural resources.
Lithium-ion batteries thrown into household rubbish were responsible for over 1,200 fires in the UK waste system in 2023, up from 700 in 2022, with 94% of local authorities saying battery-related fires in the waste stream are an increasing challenge.
Vapes are one small part of a systemic problem, and the conversation about how we solve it needs to centre on education and accessible infrastructure, not just on individual product categories.
Source: BBC
Our position
We want better recycling outcomes. We want robust takeback at retail, clear signposting, and a collection infrastructure that makes responsible disposal the path of least resistance. And we want the industry held to higher standards.
What we don’t support is a deposit scheme that hands unregulated sellers a price advantage at exactly the moment when enforcement of existing rules remains inconsistent. The ESA’s concern is legitimate. The solution needs to be smarter.
For what it’s worth, we are not standing on the sidelines on this. Totally Wicked already operates what was the first vape recycling scheme of its kind in the UK, running in partnership with WasteCare, one of only a handful of Approved Authorised Treatment Facilities in the country licensed to recycle vape products properly.
Customers can drop off used vapes at any of our retail stores across the UK, and crucially, it is not just Totally Wicked products we will take back. Any brand, bought anywhere. The materials go back into the manufacturing circular economy; what cannot be recycled is used to generate renewable energy.
That is what meaningful retail responsibility looks like in practice, and it is the standard we think the whole industry should be held to.
We’re for the people, and our aim as a vape retailer is to help make quitting smoking as easy as possible. Part of that is giving our customers a proper way to dispose of devices safely.
