Time to end special status for vaping
On a local train in the West Midlands, a young woman, maybe 18, was chatting to her friend about vaping: “You just need it so desperately, much worse than cigarettes.” It was a reminder for me of the rising issue of vaping as a health, and environmental, threat.
Behind this is a seeming success story. The indoor smoking ban, implemented in 2007, fairly strong labelling laws, education and provision of cessation help seems to be working: the latest Office for National Statistics data shows that the proportion of smokers in the UK has steadily dropped from just over 1 in 5 in 2011 to just under 1 in 7 in 2020.
But this masks another trend: the rise in vaping. The proportion of adults vaping in the UK was 6.4% in 2020, up from 3.7% in 2014. In the early days, vaping was sold to the public under the guise of a smoking cessation aid.
Vaping has become a new method of keeping Big Tobacco in business. All bar one of the giant tobacco companies have made substantial investments in e-cigarettes, as outlined by the Tobacco Tactics project at the University of Bath.
Three of these megacorporations have also now launched a single-use vaping product, the most popular type of vaping device used by children 11-17 as of 2022 according to a report by Action on Smoking and Health.
The Government has chosen not to make vapes and e-cigarettes subject to its tobacco and herbal product packaging rules. These rules mandate that cigarette and tobacco packaging must be plain and contain prominent health warnings; not so for vapes.
Thus, children are met with an array of colourful packaging and advertising for highly concentrated nicotine salts at every corner shop. Tobacco and nicotine are strange substances in which the concentrated, purified addictive chemical is less regulated by UK law than the plant in which it occurs.
As a result of Governmental oversight in packaging legislation, nicotine enjoys a special status which has led to a significant rise in vaping among 11-17 year olds according to the same report by Action on Smoking Health.
Beyond the health implications, the environmental concerns surrounding vaping are now inescapable. With single-use vapes now representing the largest proportion of vapes used by children in the UK, 1.3 million of these battery-powered devices are discarded per week. The 10 tonnes of lithium thrown into the environment as a result would be sufficient to manufacture 1,200 electric car batteries a year.
As a Green, it will not surprise readers to know that this horrifies me. But I am not alone among policymakers to see how incredibly destructive this is; other Parliamentarians have asked the Government whether an assessment of the environmental impact of these vapes had been made. As of July 2022, it had not, and the situation was unchanged by October 2022.
I have since submitted written questions to Government pressing for a timeline on when this assessment will be forthcoming, as well as asking whether the Government has considered an outright ban on these devices.
Despite Scotland having considered this, I was told that the UK Government has “no immediate plans to ban disposable vapes”, and that it will “consult on policies aimed at driving up levels of separate collection of […] vaping devices later this year”.
If disposable vapes are to remain legal (which they should not), they should be subject to the same packaging regulation as other tobacco or nicotine products - as Action on Smoking Health have pointed out in their policy brief.
Furthermore, safe recycling infrastructure needs to be put in place and the financial burden for recycling these devices must be passed on to the manufacturers, as is the case for other batteries.
As the House of Commons Library briefing on disposable vapes points out, the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment feels that “it is unclear whether [current legislation] extends to products which contain batteries, like disposable vapes.”
We do not need to reinvent the wheel: disposable vapes just need to be clearly made subject to the Waste Batteries and Accumulators Regulations and Batteries and Accumulators (Placing on the Market) Regulations.
The Government must act to ensure that big tobacco’s 'personal liberty' ends where the health of our planet and our children begins. Lax regulations around vapes, in particular disposable vapes, has led to an explosion in underage use of these environmentally destructive devices.
The Government has plenty of excellent advice at its fingertips; it should take immediate action.
Baroness Natalie Bennett is a member of the House of Lords and led the Green Party from 2012-2016.
