By Cara Waters
Used vapes are increasingly littering Melbourne’s streets and parks despite a government crackdown on e-cigarettes.
There was a 140 per cent increase in the number of vapes found littered across the country in Clean Up Australia’s annual litter count last year compared with 2023. Plastics continue to be the main litter type, representing 79.4 per cent of all litter counted.
An advertising campaign for the City of Port Phillip’s vape disposal scheme.
However, e-waste made its way into the top 10 type of litter found in Victoria for the first time, with vapes and batteries comprising the majority of e-waste found in the environment.
E-waste represented 0.8 per cent of all litter counted nationally, up from 0.5 per cent in 2023, the Clean Up Australia data, published on Thursday morning, shows.
Under laws brought in last year, the only legal vapes are pharmacy products that have limited nicotine and come in menthol, mint or tobacco flavours, designed for people who want help to quit smoking.
But illegal vapes are still widely available, and an estimated 1 million Australians use the devices.
While much of the focus has been on the health risks of vaping, the devices also have significant environmental and safety consequences.
The City of Port Phillip started a vape recycling trial last year after finding residents were putting vapes in their rubbish bins, creating a fire risk.
“I’m one of those big litter picker-uppers myself, and I can tell you, it used to be masks during COVID, but it is vapes now,” Port Phillip Mayor Louise Crawford said. “It’s the new problem child in the waste or litter world.”
“We were noticing more waste fires in our [rubbish] trucks, and it was very hard to determine exactly what caused the fire. But we thought if we took [vapes] out of the trucks, that would also stop waste going to landfill, but also [enable us] to determine if that’s part of what’s causing the fires,” Crawford said. “The good news is we haven’t had as many fires since we started doing the recycling.”
Crawford said fires in Port Phillip’s rubbish trucks had been turning into a weekly occurrence, but there had not been any “hot loads” since December.
From February to December last year, the council recycled 270 kilograms of vapes – about 4500 used devices.
“If we’re having those numbers, all the other councils are probably having similar, if not higher, numbers,” Crawford said. “We’re going to continue until April, and we are working with other councils to consider a similar service.”
The City of Casey in Melbourne’s south-east established the state’s first vape disposal service, in November 2023, and has collected 254 kilograms of vapes.
Disposable vapes seized by Australian Border Force in 2023.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Mayor Stefan Koomen said it was a step in the right direction in combating vape waste and meant more than 4200 vapes had been disposed of correctly, “vapes that could have been littering our parks and streets or potentially causing dangerous rubbish truck fires due to incorrect disposal”.
However, many council areas do not have options for proper disposal of the devices.
Clean Up Australia chair Pip Kiernan said users were confused about what to do with vapes because there was not a consistent approach to the collection and disposal of them.
“The thing about vapes is we call it a triple threat to the environment, because it is plastic waste, it’s hazardous waste, and it’s e-waste,” she said. “It doesn’t belong in the garbage bin because it does contain a battery, and those can cause fires and issues in both the truck and the waste facility if it ends up there, but it absolutely doesn’t belong in the environment.”
Port Phillip Mayor Louise Crawford with a vape collection bin.Credit: Simon Schluter
Kiernan said Clean Up Australia’s figures showed the container deposit scheme had greatly reduced the number of cans and bottles turning up as litter and a similar scheme was needed for vapes.
“It’s a good example where we need a good producer-responsibility scheme where the entity importing or manufacturing that product is responsible for its collection and safe disposal at the end of its life,” she said. “These items are very problematic when they end up in the environment.”
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