The Disposable Vape Was Always Going to Be a Waste Problem

IMAGE [Garbage truck picking up trash bins from the curb in an American suburban neighborhood]

In 2025, waste and recycling facilities across the United States reported 448 fires – officially the worst year on record. While the causes vary, lithium-ion batteries are overwhelmingly responsible for many incidents, and disposable vapes are among the fastest-growing sources. A small battery sealed inside a plastic tube, thrown into the garbage without a second thought, is now a routine hazard for the people who handle what you throw away.

The plastic tube in question is a disposable vape. The battery inside it is the same chemistry used to power electric vehicles, laptops, and cordless drills, except that in those products, the battery is engineered to be removed, maintained, or recycled. In a disposable vape, it is designed to be thrown away. 

This, in hindsight, was only ever going to end one way.

What Happens Inside the Truck

Garbage trucks compact their loads. As you might expect, this is certainly not a gentle process. When a lithium-ion cell is crushed or punctured, it can enter what battery engineers call thermal runaway, triggering a chain reaction in which the internal temperature climbs to 350 degrees Celsius in minutes, igniting everything around it. The cell does not need to be fully charged. Even a partially depleted battery retains enough energy to start a fire that can gut a sorting line or destroy a collection vehicle.

Waste workers are now trained to spot these small devices before they reach the compactor, but the scale of the problem makes that close to impossible. Disposable vapes are small, look like dozens of other plastic items on a conveyor belt, and arrive in volumes that no manual sorting process can reliably intercept. 

One facility in Cincinnati recently installed an X-ray detection system that identifies up to 110 battery hazards per day. The fact that such technology is now considered necessary tells you everything about the size of the problem.

The EPA classifies lithium-ion batteries as materials that should never enter household trash or curbside recycling. Disposable vapes, by definition, contain lithium-ion batteries, and yet the word disposable in their name practically instructs the consumer to do exactly what the EPA says they should not.

A Product Designed to Become Waste

The disposable vape was a design failure. With no buttons, no refilling, and no learning curve, you used it until it died, then simply threw it away. The appeal to the vaping masses was obvious – the consequences less so.

Each device contains a battery, a circuit board, a heating element, copper wiring, and a plastic shell, none of which decomposes in a landfill within any timeframe relevant to anyone currently alive. With an estimated 840 million vaping devices discarded globally each year, the lithium alone, if recovered and recycled, could power thousands of electric vehicles. Instead, it sits in the ground or catches fire in the back of a truck.

The American regulatory response has been mixed. California has proposed banning disposable vapes entirely, while Maine, New Jersey, and Oregon have introduced or enacted producer responsibility legislation. Most states, however, still treat these devices the same way they treat any other piece of household garbage, which is to say they do not treat them at all.

The UK Already Fixed This

In a decision that was driven almost entirely by the waste problem, the United Kingdom banned the sale of single-use vapes on June 1, 2025. Before the ban, Material Focus estimated that five million disposable vapes were being discarded every week across Britain — a fourfold increase in a single year. In 2022 alone, a staggering 40 tonnes of lithium from disposable vapes were thrown away, enough to build batteries for 5,000 electric cars.

Adults who vape in the UK now use rechargeable, refillable vape kits, which are designed to last months or years rather than mere days. The battery is rechargeable, the liquid is easily replaceable (with a huge range of flavors available, unlike the US market), and even the coil can be swapped. The device, therefore, stays firmly out of the waste stream because it was never intended to enter it.

The transition was entirely logical. If the problem is a product designed to become garbage, the solution is to stop designing products that become garbage. 

Meanwhile, in America

America has not banned disposable vapes, nor has it mandated producer responsibility at the federal level, or required retailers to accept used devices for recycling. What it has done is left waste facility operators to deal with the consequences of a product that was sold with no plan for what happens after the last puff.

The 448 fires in 2025 will almost certainly be exceeded in 2026, as the lithium continues to accumulate in landfills. All over America tonight, consumers will finish a disposable vape and drop it in the kitchen trash. There it will sit, unremarkable, unalarming, and completely inert, until it isn’t.