On average, Americans dispose of 5.7 electronic cigarettes, also commonly known as vapes, every second. That’s roughly 500,000 e-cigarettes per day, and over 182 million every year.
While much of the focus on the side effects of vaping surrounds the impact of e-cigarettes on health, little attention is brought to the damage vapes bring to the environment. With over 80 million people worldwide using vapes, the pollution and environmental impacts are widespread, detrimentally affecting ecosystems and life around the world.
Vapes contain a variety of different plastics and metals, most of which are non-biodegradable, meaning that they can take hundreds of years to break down. With such a widespread use of vapes, their effects can be monumental on the environment, overflowing landfills with toxic, non-decomposable materials that rot for centuries and leech into water sources.
For example, if every single vape sold in 2023 was lined up, the waste would stretch 8,772 miles, nearly a third of the total circumference of the Earth. This shows the extreme harm that vapes pose to the environment, severely increasing the amount of non-biodegradable waste on Earth while also having harmful health side effects.
Contributing to landfills is extremely dangerous, now more than ever, because of the effect of landfills on climate change. ‘Open’ landfills are the most common on Earth, and allow for greenhouse gases to be released directly into the atmosphere and the air we breathe. For example, 20% of human-related methane emissions come from open landfills. This effect is extremely alarming with the total state of climate change, as several climatologists have warned that 2035 is the “point of no return” for recovering from climate change, meaning global catastrophes on an unprecedented scale. In order to meet the goal of preventing climate change from reaching this point, steps must be taken across the world to limit emissions, and eliminating the waste from vapes would be vital.
As vapes fill up landfills, contributing non-biodegradable plastics and metals to the environment and worsening climate change, they also release microplastics into various ecosystems. At landfills, microplastics and different types of waste can seep into the soil and waterways, ultimately polluting ecosystems and greatly impacting the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of different species around the world. For example, chemicals from vapes have been reported finding their way into the water we drink and the water several different species of aquatic life thrive in, ultimately having a severe impact on the environment.
Not only that, but the use of lithium batteries in vapes is extremely detrimental to the environment. Firstly, lithium batteries are significant fire hazards that can cause fires in landfills, further leaching harmful chemicals into the environment. Second, lithium batteries are an extremely valuable, finite resource that vapes waste. The lithium from all vapes sold annually is enough to power 3,350 electric vehicles, which are vital to the fight against climate change. However, by wasting lithium batteries on vapes, they pose a severe risk to the environment and damage ecosystems around the world.
When most people think about the harms of vapes, they only consider the harm to their own health. While that should be enough to dissuade anyone from vaping, the environmental impacts that vapes have on millions of lives around the world should convince them to quit vaping, as they leave behind countless harms on our planet long after they are used up.
