By deciding to quit smoking with an electronic cigarette, you're taking care of your health, and you're preventing some of the 4300 billion cigarette butts that are thrown into the wild every year from polluting the environment.
Besides, did you know that you can generally recycle your electronic cigarette and your vaping equipment? Giving a new lease of life to your equipment and e-liquid bottles is an environmentally-friendly act, as you can imagine.
In this guide, we tell you how you can recycle your e-cigarette's components and consumables so that you too can take care of our planet.
How do you recycle e-liquid and concentrate bottles?
As you already know, plastic is a real threat to the environment, and the TPD (European Tobacco Products Directive) hasn't helped matters by limiting the size of nicotined e-liquids to just 10ml, further increasing the number of bottles that end up in nature.
Unfortunately, e-liquid bottles that have a 'harmful' or 'toxic' symbol on them cannot be recycled. Indeed, it's legally forbidden to recycle these products if the nicotine has come into contact with the bottle and its cap.
So, they'll end up incinerated because of this, even if they're made from PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic, which is widely recycled.
On the other hand, if your bottle doesn't have a 'harmful' or 'toxic' symbol on it, it can be fully recycled, including its cap. Simply dispose of it into your usual packaging recycling bin. Moreover, there's no need to rinse your bottle before putting it into the recycling bin, since the plastics are crushed and then separated using water. So, save your own water!
Of course, the glass bottles can be recycled as well. Just dispose of them as you would do for any other glass.
Finally, know that you can also reuse your larger bottles for storing your e-liquids. If you're a DIY enthusiast, big bottles such as base liquid containers are perfect for storing your home-made mixtures. They'll steep and mature in the best conditions!
Recycling your batteries and electronic mods
An electronic cigarette with a built-in battery, if that's what you use, is classed as a WEEE, namely 'waste electrical and electronic equipment'. This category includes electronic products such as household appliances, computers and telephones, among others.
As is the case for your old toaster, shaver or hoover, your electronic cigarette and its built-in battery can be fully recycled at your local tip. All of its components will be dismantled and recycled by a specialised company.
It's important to properly recycle your electronic cigarette. Indeed, an e-cigarette contains many materials like steel, plastic, copper and stainless steel, which can all be reused in some way. So, give a new lease of life to your electronic cigarette!
Recycling your clearomiser
Things are a bit different for your electronic cigarette's clearomiser, as it doesn't fall into any particular category of waste products like electronic batteries do.
However, most clearomisers can be dismantled, so you can sort the various components into which ones can be recycled and how. Whether it's the rubber seals, the glass tank or the drip tip, all can be recycled in some way or another usually. Each part can go in the appropriate recycling bin.
Clearomiser tanks, though, are actually made of borosilicate and not glass, often known as Pyrex, and these cannot be recycled like normal glass. Their specific manufacturing process prevents them from being recycled, so they must be thrown away with the common household waste.
What to do with old coils
Coils are an essential consumable of any electronic cigarette. They're mainly made from a variety of metals that can all be recycled. Therefore, it's important that you do not throw them in the normal bin. Your local tip is bound to have a metal recycling container.
So, hold on to all those old coils and take them with you the next time you go to the tip!
Recycling pre-filled cartridges
Pre-filled e-liquid cartridges are usually found on 'podmod' electronic cigarettes, and they can't be washed and rid of their nicotine unfortunately. Thus, you can't recycle them, they'll have to go in the normal bin with the rest of the household waste.
Recycling your batteries
The batteries that power your electronic cigarettes must be disposed of in a specific way. European law forbids throwing any type of battery in the bin. Indeed, the substances inside these batteries (Lithium-Ion, Lithium-Manganese, or Lithium-Iron to name a few) are very polluting and should be recycled properly.
Obviously tips will take them, but some supermarkets, shops, and vape shops also have special bins for collecting them.
For safety reasons, we recommend that you protect the positive and negative poles of your batteries before recycling them, with a piece of adhesive tape for example. This is so that the battery poles don't come into contact with another metallic object, which could cause a fire.
Adding to this, the French interprofessional vaping association (FIVAPE) has teamed up with the Screlec to collect and recycle your old batteries in most French vape shops. This action falls within the vaping industry's desire to reduce the environmental impact of its products.
Finally, French-based vapers can easily find the nearest collection point for their batteries thanks to Batribox.
What to do with electronic cigarette packaging
In addition to the e-cigarette itself, the packaging it comes in can also be recycled most of the time.
Vaping products are also victim of excessive packaging and overwrapping, just like many consumer products, and you can combat this with a few simple steps. To start, separate the different components that make up your vaping product's packaging. Cardboard and polyurethane foams can be collected and recycled. On the other hand, the blister pack that's often wrapped around the cardboard box must be thrown in the household waste bin, as it cannot be recycled.
Where can I find a tip?
Wherever you live, there's bound to be a tip nearby. Just pop down with your vaping waste to recycle them, the environment will thank you for it!
A&L takes care of your waste!
As part of a general effort to improve the vaping market in France, Arômes et Liquides and the other FIVAPE members have come up with a repository of good industry practices for the online sale of vaping products.
One of these is to help protect the environment, and that's why at A&L we collect your vaping waste and then take it to be recycled. All you have to do is send us your waste and we take care of its collection and recycling!
Send it to the following address:
Arômes et Liquides
348 rue François Durafour
42160 Andrézieux-Bouthéon
France
We can take care of the following waste, and only this:
- batteries
- e-liquid and concentrate bottles
- D3E-class electrical equipment (waste from electrical or electronic equipment)
In conclusion, it is possible to recycle most of the waste created by vaping products. The main difficulty today is finding a collection point near your home for each type of waste. However, local councils and big players of the vaping scene such as Arômes et Liquides offer you more and more solutions for collecting and recycling your electronic cigarette products. As you know, there's no small gesture when it comes to protecting the environment!