Almost five million single-use vapes were either littered or thrown into general waste each week in 2023, according to the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Batteries thrown into household waste cause hundreds of fires in bin lorries and waste-processing centres every year.

As well as lithium-ion batteries, vapes also contain circuit boards which – if not disposed of properly – can leach toxic compounds such as cobalt and copper into the environment as they degrade.

These minerals and the lithium could, if recovered, be reused for green technologies such as electric car batteries or in wind turbines. These industries are already facing a potential shortage of these metals as demand for clean energy grows, external.

In 2022, vapes containing a total of more than 40 tonnes of lithium were discarded, enough to power 5,000 electric vehicles, the government said.



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Before you post, please prove you are sentient.

What color is fresh snow?

Explore More

Smart thermostats provide sleep insights at home

A new study to be presented at the SLEEP 2024 annual meeting offers a framework for an objective, non-invasive and zero-effort sleep monitoring system utilizing smart thermostats equipped with motion

Unlocking the secrets of cancer metastasis: study provides new insights, potential therapeutic opportunities

Metastasis remains the primary challenge to reducing cancer deaths worldwide, says Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) gastrointestinal oncologist Karuna Ganesh, MD, PhD. That’s when a primary tumor — colorectal

‘Achilles heel’ of drug-resistant pathogens

A University of Otago-led study has found highly vulnerable weakness in drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis, offering a new way to kill them. In the study, published in Nature Communications, researchers developed