UK to ban disposable vapes from Sunday – with fines of £200 or even jailtime for offenders
A ban on disposable vapes will come into effect in the UK on Sunday, 1 June.
From this date, it will be illegal for businesses to sell or supply single-use vapes. It will also be illegal to offer to sell or supply single-use vapes, or to stock single-use vapes that businesses plan to sell or supply.
The ban applies to both sales online and in physical shops and will impact all vapes, whether or not they contain nicotine. Businesses with remaining disposable vapes are expected to make recycling arrangements.
It should be noted that businesses can still sell and supply vapes that are reusable.
The government defines a vape as single-use if it either:
- Has a battery you cannot recharge.
- It is not refillable.
To be reusable, a vape must have a:
- Rechargeable battery;
- Refillable container that holds the vaping e-liquid (such as a chamber, capsule, cartridge, pod or tank);
- Removable and replaceable coil (if the vape contains a coil).
Fines and penalties
How the ban is enforced varies between the UK’s four nations and is specific to where a business operates.
In England, each local authority’s Trading Standards leads on enforcing the ban within its area. In the first instance, Trading Standards will apply civil sanctions (non-criminal penalties) such as a stop notice, a compliance notice, or a fine of £200.
If businesses continue to stock, sell or supply single-use vapes, they can be charged with an unlimited fine or even a prison sentence of up to two years.
Why the government is banning single-use vapes
While there are health concerns around vaping, especially among young people, this ban is primarily about reducing environmental damage.
As well as being eyesores, discarded vapes have a hugely damaging impact on our environment and wildlife, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs said.
Animals such as birds, fish, and marine mammals can mistake vapes for food and ingest poisonous chemicals.
“Whether littered or thrown in a bin and sent to landfill, single-use vapes also release substances like lead and mercury into our soil, rivers and streams. This damages ecosystems and habitats.”
“The plastics used in these products are nearly impossible for nature to completely break down. Instead, they break into tiny pieces of ‘microplastics’ which can enter our food chains,” it said.
“These vapes may take a few days to finish, but their environmental harms stick around for a very, very long time. Say one ‘disposable’ vape promises about 600 puffs – its plastic casing will easily last for 600 years buried in the earth.”
In 2024, recycling group Material Focus estimated that almost five million single-use vapes were either littered or thrown away in general waste every week in the UK; the equivalent of eight being thrown away per second.
This is extremely wasteful of the valuable resources contained in these vapes, such as cobalt and copper. In 2022, the same group found that more than 40 tonnes of lithium were discarded in single-use vapes. This is the same amount used to power 5,000 electric vehicles.
For the small number of single-use vapes which are sent for recycling, it’s a difficult job, because they contain many chemical components and are not designed to be taken apart. They usually have to be disassembled by hand – a slow and tricky process which struggles to match the avalanche of vapes that are produced and discarded.
The lithium-ion batteries in these vapes can also cause fires, which risks the safety of waste management workers, firefighters and the public.
