Since the UK banned single-use vapes in June over health and environmental concerns, Viacheslav Semeniuk has had his work cut out extracting thousands of batteries from the devices to send to Ukraine, where they are made into power banks for frontline troops.
The Ukrainian volunteer, who has lived in Leeds, a city in northern England, for the past decade, says UK producers of e-cigarettes “can’t sell them anymore so basically we’re just helping to make [manufacturers and retailers’] lives easier, because they need to do something with them.”
A recent delivery of four pallets of brand new vapes to the Leeds Ukrainian Community Association, which Semeniuk co-founded in 2022, adds up to more than 10,000 individual devices which he and a small band of volunteers are currently working through.
“We gather together in my house or whoever’s house it is and then we sit maybe watching a movie or drinking wine,” Semeniuk says of the sessions breaking down vape pens. “It’s like a family evening.”
Elsewhere in the UK, entrepreneur Tom Nabielec has collected unwanted vapes to be donated to the Ukrainian Social Club in London, which also ships batteries to Ukraine. He confirmed to RFE/RL that disposable e-cigarettes are now relatively easy to source from shops free of charge. “It costs [retailers] money to recycle otherwise and here in the UK they must by law.”
Nabielec says he was given vapes from one retail outlet, which soon “spread the word to the other shops in their small chain” about the potential to donate stockpiles to Ukrainian charities.
Semeniuk says the vapes are broken down in the UK to avoid customs fees when travelling through Europe and into Ukraine, a lesson learned the hard way when one shipment of e-cigarettes that had not been dismantled was turned back on the Dutch border. The driver, “had to return from the Netherlands to Leeds to unload them and then turn around and drive back again,” the Ukrainian says.
Transporting potentially resellable vape devices internationally requires tax fees and extensive importation paperwork. However, "waste” products such as boxes of loose batteries that Semeniuk and other volunteers are extracting can be carried across borders without such bureaucratic friction.
The batteries are taped up for the journey across Europe to reduce the risk of fire that can occur when exposed battery terminals touch and short circuit.
Once inside Ukraine, the batteries are glued into 3D-printed power bank shells by teams which Semeniuk works with in Lviv. The rugged, rechargeable finished product features mutiple power outlets. Frontline soldiers use the powerbanks for “whatever USB-powered devices there are,” Semeniuk says.
On the Russian side of the ongoing war in Ukraine, vape users are being asked to donate e-cigarettes for their batteries and wiring. “One e-cigarette = one drop from a drone onto the enemy!” one poster in a university in the southwestern Russian city of Samara proclaimed. Small servomotors used to drop munitions from drones can be powered by a single disposable vape battery.
Use of e-cigarettes has exploded over the past decade, with an estimated 100 million users worldwide. The devices, which heat nicotine-containing liquid to produce vapor, are thought to be less harmful than cigarettes but still carry significant health risks. The UK government flagged the environmental issues of single-use vapes as a major factor in banning the devices.
According to one report, e-cigarettes discarded in the UK each year contain enough lithium to create 5,000 electric car batteries.
