A new tax on vape liquid started on the 1 October. Some in the trade fear it could quietly bring back the throwaway vape, and the litter that came with it.
It is just over 16 months since single-use vapes were banned in England. Before June 2025, the brightly coloured plastic sticks were a familiar sight on pavements across Sheffield on a Sunday morning, wedged in drains and kicked into gutters outside the bars of West Street and Division Street. The ban was supposed to put an end to that.
Now there is a new worry. Since 1 October 2026, vape liquid sold in the UK carries excise duty. The tax is designed to make vaping less affordable, particularly for young people. But the way it is charged could nudge casual vapers back towards cheap, disposable-style devices, and back into the habit of binning them after one night out.
What actually changed on 1 October
According to HMRC, the new Vaping Products Duty is charged at a flat £2.20 for every 10ml of vape liquid. It applies whether the liquid contains nicotine or not, and VAT is still added on top. If a manufacturer passes the full cost on, that works out at £2.64 extra at the till for every 10ml.
Shoppers will not feel it all at once. Retailers have until 31 March 2027 to sell older, untaxed stock. From 1 April 2027, every vape product sold in the UK must carry a yellow or red duty stamp, and anything without one should be treated as suspect.
The key detail is that the tax follows the liquid, not the device. That sounds fair on paper. In practice, it changes which products look like good value, and that is where the litter problem could creep back in.
Why refillers feel it most
Because the duty is charged per millilitre, the bigger the bottle, the bigger the jump. A 100ml bottle of nicotine-free shortfill, the go-to for many long-term vapers with refillable kits, picks up £26.40 in tax once VAT is added. That could take a bottle that cost around £15 to more than £40 once duty-paid stock reaches the shelves.
A single 2ml pre-filled pod, by contrast, picks up about 53p.
Measured per millilitre, pre-filled pods were already the most expensive way to vape, and they still are. But nobody works out the price per millilitre at a corner shop counter at midnight. People look at the sticker, and the sticker is about to make refilling look expensive and grabbing a cheap pod kit look like the easy option.
Disposable in all but name
When the ban arrived, the colourful little bars did not disappear. Manufacturers added a USB-C charging port and a detachable pre-filled pod, and carried on. The Elf Bar 600 for example, the name most people still associate with the disposable boom, is back on sale as a rechargeable pod kit holding the same 2ml of liquid – so it will only become 53p more expensive.
These devices are legal, and they can be reused. Clip in a fresh pod, top up the battery, and one kit can last for months. The problem is that, to an untrained eye, they look no different from the vapes that were banned, and plenty of people treat them exactly the same way.
The figures back that up. Research published by recycling charity Material Focus in March 2026 found that 6.3 million vapes and pods are still thrown away in the UK every week. That is 23% fewer than before the ban, which is real progress, but 47% of vapers surveyed did not know their vapes could be recycled at all.
The new duty adds another nudge in the wrong direction. With some pre-filled kits selling for under £4, swapping the pod can save so little that buying a whole new kit feels like the same thing. If rising refill prices push more casual vapers towards these devices, more of them are likely to end up in the bin, or the gutter, after a single use.
Why we should be paying attention
Sheffield knows this problem well. In January 2024, the city council wrote to the government urging a ban on disposable vapes, pointing to them as a big source of litter on the city’s streets. The ban followed 17 months later.
Nights out are where the old habit is most likely to creep back. Picture the usual routine: a pod kit grabbed from a late-night shop on the way into town, used for a few hours, then left on a bar table, lost in a smoking area or dropped on the walk home. Nobody is thinking about replacement pods at 2am, and nobody is carrying a refill bottle in their back pocket.
Add tens of thousands of students watching every penny, and the busy bars and clubs of West Street, Division Street and Kelham Island, and the conditions are there for a slow return. It will not happen overnight, because shops can keep selling untaxed stock until the end of March. The real test is likely to come in spring 2027, as duty-paid prices land on every shelf in the city.
What can actually be done
None of this is inevitable, and a few simple habits would go a long way.
Hand your old vapes back. Shops that sell vapes have a legal duty to offer a way to recycle them. Never put a vape in a household bin; the lithium batteries inside are behind a growing number of fires in bin lorries and recycling centres.
Keep the kit, swap the pod. If you use a pre-filled device, treat it as the reusable product it is. The battery is the part that does the damage when it is thrown away, and it is built to last far longer than one night out.
If you vape every day, refill. Even with the duty added, a refillable pod kit and bottled e-liquid is still the cheapest way to vape per millilitre, and it creates a fraction of the waste.
Venues can help too. A vape collection box in the smoking area costs very little and catches devices at exactly the moment people are most likely to lose them. And from April 2027, if a vape has no duty stamp, do not buy it.
The vape tax may well do what it was designed to do and make vaping less appealing to young people. But if it ends up making the throwaway habit look cheaper than the responsible one, Sheffield’s streets could be paying the price long after the tax has been counted.
This article was written by the team at Vape & E-Liquid, an independent online vape retailer based just down the road in Chesterfield. Vape & E-Liquid sells UK-compliant kits, pods and e-liquids to adults aged 18 and over.
