IMAGE [A man rests on a beach lounger while using a vape, facing out to sea]
On 1 June 2025, Britain banned single-use disposable vapes. With too much plastic in landfills up and down the nation, an alarming number of lithium batteries catching fire, the legislation made perfect sense. Six months later, British consumers were throwing away roughly 6.3 million vapes a week.
Admittedly, this is down from the pre-ban high of around nine million. A thirty-one percent reduction, which, if you squint, might even count as progress. There are also an extraordinary number of devices to be discarded in a country where the sale of the product in question is, technically speaking, illegal.
Big Puff
Within weeks of the ban, a new category of device had filled the shelves of every vape shop in Britain. These were, officially, rechargeable devices with replaceable pods. They were marketed as the responsible, refillable future that the regulations had demanded. They are widely referred to in the trade as Big Puff.
A typical Big Puff kit offers somewhere between 6,000 and 30,000 puffs, comes pre-filled, is sold in the same colors and flavors as the banned disposables, and is thrown away at approximately the same rate. The pod is technically replaceable in the sense that replacing it is theoretically possible. Whether anyone actually does so is a separate question, and one that the data does not answer flatteringly.
At a recent UK vape industry expo, one specialist retailer reported that roughly ninety-five percent of the exhibitors were showcasing devices designed (with varying degrees of subtlety) to exploit the loophole, although some of them did not bother with subtlety at all.
The legislation banned single-use devices, but the market quickly responded with versions that were single-use in everything but name, and the bins filled up again.
Meanwhile, in Scotland
Scottish Fire and Rescue reported sixty-nine lithium-battery fires in 2025, compared with twenty in 2019. The fires are not all attributable to vapes, of course, but a meaningful share of them are traceable to the specific category of device that was supposed to be going away, quickly binned alongside the takeaway containers and the cardboard.
A lithium cell compressed by a garbage truck does not distinguish between a banned disposable and a Big Puff rebrand. It simply catches fire. The waste industry, which had, presumably, been hoping the ban would reduce its insurance premiums, is now revising those hopes downward.
The Tax
On 1 October 2026, the UK will introduce a Vaping Products Duty of £2.20 per 10ml of liquid. A 100ml shortfill bottle, currently around £15, will jump to something closer to £37.
The same government that banned disposables in the name of public health is about to tax the alternatives at a rate that will make some consumers reconsider cigarettes. Market research suggests that around thirty percent of former disposable users would consider returning to smoking if the alternative became expensive or tiresome enough. Roughly two-thirds said they would buy illicit vapes if they could find them readily. In most parts of Britain, finding them readily is not difficult.
The Other Hand
Even now, the government is still handing out free vape starter kits through the NHS Swap to Stop scheme. Doctors in Leeds and Bristol are putting them in the hands of long-term smokers and pairing them with follow-up support, because by now the evidence for vaping as a quitting tool is hard to argue with.
Britain is, simultaneously, banning disposables, taxing the refillable alternatives, and prescribing free rechargeable kits to smokers. These are not obviously the same policy. They are, however, the same government.
What the Americans Wanted
For years, American campaigners pointed at Britain and asked why the US could not simply ban the problematic products and be done with it. Britain’s experiment is, for anyone genuinely interested in evidence, the closest thing to a controlled trial the debate has ever produced.
Prohibition did not make the devices vanish, but merely reshuffled them into new packaging with a longer charge cycle. The category that did meaningfully shrink was the smaller one: refillable vape kits from established manufacturers, bought mostly by adult ex-smokers who wanted a device that worked, saw a modest bump.
The American campaigner will note that Britain’s ban, therefore, did not work. The British regulator will note that the ban was never going to work in isolation, which is why the duty and the Swap to Stop scheme exist alongside it. The shop owner, meanwhile, will note that they sold nine million devices a week before the ban and six million afterward and would prefer everyone involved to simply make up their mind.
The Public Interest Research Group estimates that America throws away roughly 500,000 disposables per day. Rather astonishingly, that is 5.7 per second.
Britain tried the experiment, and the outcome pleased nobody. In that sense, it may have worked exactly as advertised.
