More than 25,000 vapes are likely swept up every month from Aberdeenshire’s streets and from within the drainage fittings on roads and highways, the council said.
Aberdeenshire Council supplies waste management specialists Levenseat with around 250 tonnes of street sweepings and gully emptyings every month. They are washed and separated out into gravel, soil, sand, and organics for composting so that the materials can be re-used.
In a recent trial at Levenseat, an eddy current separator was used to reveal around 5,000 vapes from just 50 tonnes of Aberdeenshire’s sweepings and gully waste.
Manufacturing vapes uses up some of the most valuable resources on the planet—steel, aluminium, copper, lithium—which makes recycling them even more important. Recycling just ten tonnes of lithium from these products could supply enough material to produce batteries for approximately 1,200 electric cars opens in a new tab.
Specialised drums are available at all household recycling centres across Aberdeenshire to safely store vapes before they are transported to Veolia in Portsmouth for vape recycling.
Veolia rolled out the UK’s first nationwide vape collection service and can recover 94 per cent of all the materials inside of them.
“It is alarming how fast the rise of single use vapes has been. When we think about all the precious materials that are used to create them, just for them to be thrown away on our streets, it must surely be the truest meaning of e-waste,” Cllr Alan Turnerm, chair of the council’s Infrastructure Services Committee, said.
A ban on the sale and supply of single-use vapes in Scotland is due to come into effect on 1 April 2025.
New research by Material Focus has identified that a quarter of a billion plus vapes will be thrown away in the UK on the run up to the ban. UK-wise sales of disposable single-use vapes are now around 360 million per annum with over 5 million of them thrown away every week—the equivalent of eight vapes per second.
