Yeah ban is the answer. Trouble is that, as shown in the article, even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.

Taxing waste is one part of the story but it's actually a really good thing that vaping is cheaper than smoking so this can only go so far before it's counterproductive.

I think the answers lie in stuff like banning sale of pre-filled ones. If you make people buy a separate bottle of nicotine liquid (and you enforce that this is quite a large minimum size, like we already do with tobacco) and fill the device up before they use it, I think they are much more likely to refill it when it's empty and recharge it when it's dead.

Maybe another thing could be restricting points of sale. I bet a lot of the waste comes from drunk people buying them at 10pm in the corner shop near the pub. If you make people plan ahead that might also help.

> Trouble is that, [...], even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.

Well that is fixable, it's even one of the solutions posited here. Just make them artificially expensive by adding a deposit, which you'll get back when you return it to the shop (instead of throwing it away).

But they don't need to be taken back anywhere. They are reusable. So this just ends up back at what I said about "taxing waste".

I think disposable vapes are banned in the U.K. (where I think the author is?) or at least they will be soon. But the non-disposable options end up being cheap enough that they can be disposed of when empty.

I think a better thing to do may be to try to embed disposal costs into the price of the original product. That changes prices to hopefully incentivise reuse.

This is true but as a workaround disposable vapes now all include a charging port but are still treated as disposable (so is just another component to be wasted)

I'm in favour of a full ban but it's complex