If you are a smoker, switching to E-Cigarettes can be one of the best things you can do for your body, as well as for the environment.

However, if you are a smoker concerned about your environmental impact and want to switch to e-cigarettes, avoid disposable e-cigarettes at all costs!

This may appear extreme, but today we will look at the environmental impact of disposable e-cigarettes and how you can switch to E-Cigarettes without contributing to the problem.

Environmental impact of tobacco

But, before we get into disposable E-Cigarettes, we want to make it clear that if you are still a smoker, that is also bad for the environment.

Although it may not appear to be much, every cigarette you smoke, especially those with filters, harms the environment.

We went into more detail about how tobacco harms the environment here, but to summarise, every step of the cigarette manufacturing process actively harms the environment. Everything from how most tobacco is grown to when you smoke it to what happens to the used filters has a negative impact on the environment.

Tobacco farming is still a huge business, and many farmers will grow it exclusively for years and years. Tobacco plants, on the other hand, are

a major attraction for many pests, causing the local ecosystem to become out of balance and diseases to "crop" up.

To protect their livelihood, most tobacco farmers will use harsh pesticides, which has the unintended consequence of severely harming the local bee population (as bees are very susceptible to pesticides). We've all known for years that the bee population is declining at an alarming rate, and tobacco is a contributing factor.

But that's not all; cigarette smoke itself pollutes the atmosphere. Most smokers are aware that tobacco contains at least 4000 chemicals (including arsenic, lead, and cyanide) and 50+ carcinogens, but most of us have never considered where all that smoke goes.Toxin output per cigarette is negligible, but when over 6 TRILLION cigarettes are smoked worldwide each year, it adds up.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, used filters have a negative impact on the environment. Each cigarette, as previously stated, contains thousands of chemicals that can harm not only you but also the environment. However, not all of those chemicals enter our bodies or are dispersed in the air; many are trapped in the filter.

This means that when you throw away your filter, all of the chemicals it contained are dumped into the landfill, where they begin to leach out. This has the potential to harm the ecosystem and water in a large area surrounding the landfill, potentially resulting in the death of people.

Animals are being slaughtered and plants are being destroyed in landfills.

Disposable Vape Batteries

Getting off cigarettes then is not only great for your health, but better for the planet as a whole. However if you are making the switch from cigarettes to disposable E-Cigarattes, then you aren’t doing the planet as big a service as you might think.

All E-Cigarettes contain a lithium-ion battery, but what makes disposable E-Cigarettes so much worse than other types of E-Cigarettes is that once you are done with your disposable e-cigarette you just throw it away.

The means that if you use 1 disposable every 2 days, in 1 month you are throwing away 15 batteries and in a year that is almost 200 batteries going into the bin.

And almost all disposable e-cigarettes, due to having not only the battery but all the electronics, can’t be recycled. This means all these are ending up in landfill.

As the batteries inside the disposable corrode, the chemicals leak into ground around it and contaminate groundwater and surface water.

Another worrying issue is that disposed lithium batteries can be very unstable, and even start fires. Unlike other types of E-Cigarette where the battery is designed for long term use, disposable e-cigarettes only have to worry about working until the liquid inside runs out, which can lead to major issues when they are thrown away.

Lithium batteries can cause landfill fires that can smoulder for years and year, which results in the toxic chemicals being released into the air.

And what makes it worse is that the solution to this is easy, make the battery rechargeable and separate from the rest of the E-Cigarette.

By doing this, batteries aren’t being thrown away all the time and don’t end up in landfill. It also means that the batteries can be re-cycled with the other batteries properly and safely.

It’s not just better from an individual point of view either, rechargeable batteries consume less non-renewable natural resources overall than disposable batteries, simply because less need to be made.

These solutions though have already been implemented, which is why the Vape POD style exists. Unlike a disposable that is one large machine, a POD style has two parts, the rechargeable battery and the actual pod (which holds the e-liquid).

By doing this the POD style batteries can be reused, and eventually be re-cycled when they stop working, completely avoiding the landfill and all those issues.

Disposable E-Cigarette Plastic

Only certain types of plastics, as we are all well aware, can be recycled. If the plastic is too dirty or contains electronics or other materials, it must be disposed of in a landfill.

And this is a major issue, as thousands of tonnes of plastic end up in landfill every year, where it will remain for hundreds of years. Worse, it burns, filling the surrounding air and water with micro-plastic particles that slowly clog the oceans and air.

This is especially true for any plastic with electronics or other materials attached to it. Having multiple types of material on one item makes recycling extremely difficult because the individual materials must be separated before they can be recycled.

All of this means that disposables made of a battery, plastic, and electronics are nearly impossible to recycle.

The POD style, on the other hand, is recyclable for two reasons. The first and most obvious reason is that the battery is not connected to the pod refill, allowing you to recycle the battery as usual.

The actual used pods, on the other hand, can be more difficult to recycle because they contain both plastic and electronics; however, at SMOKO, we are committed to being a carbon negative company, which is why we have found a way to recycle the pods.
 

Should You Buy a Disposable E-Cigarette?