They should just be banned outright. In no world is this going to end up in bins 100% of the time. Disposable really means it’s destined for the trash at best, and just simply litter at worst.

This guy[1] explains the problem quite well.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU

Yeah ban is the answer. Trouble is that, as shown in the article, even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.

Taxing waste is one part of the story but it's actually a really good thing that vaping is cheaper than smoking so this can only go so far before it's counterproductive.

I think the answers lie in stuff like banning sale of pre-filled ones. If you make people buy a separate bottle of nicotine liquid (and you enforce that this is quite a large minimum size, like we already do with tobacco) and fill the device up before they use it, I think they are much more likely to refill it when it's empty and recharge it when it's dead.

Maybe another thing could be restricting points of sale. I bet a lot of the waste comes from drunk people buying them at 10pm in the corner shop near the pub. If you make people plan ahead that might also help.

I think disposable vapes are banned in the U.K. (where I think the author is?) or at least they will be soon. But the non-disposable options end up being cheap enough that they can be disposed of when empty.

I think a better thing to do may be to try to embed disposal costs into the price of the original product. That changes prices to hopefully incentivise reuse.