Friday August 8th 2025
The Dalkeith Guerrilla Gardeners litter picking
Written by Midlothian View Reporter, Liam Eunson
On the 1st of June, the UK Government banned single-use disposable vapes across the UK as part of an effort to help reduce littering and improve the overal environment.
The ban planned to eliminate a complex waste stream as discarded disposable vapes can hugely damage the environment and wildlife. Animals, such as birds, fish, and other marine wildlife, can mistake vapes for food. Alongside this, the vapes release damaging substances like lead and mercury into soil, so if either littered or binned to end up in landfill, the vape products can still damage the ecosystem.
Although it has been over two months since the ban, disposable vapes are still being found in Midlothian’s environment.
A Dalkeith based gardening and litter picking group, The Dalkeith Guerrilla Gardiners, who spread passion for the environment through gardening and litter picking, have highlighted that they are still finding these disposable vapes littered in the local environement.
A member of the group, Ken Cramond explained, “There has been no change in overall litter. There are definitely less disposable vapes, although we are still finding them.”
“There have been allegations of some still on sale despite being illegal sincfe June. It may be we are just finding ones sold earlier. Time will tell.”
The plastic used in the vape products is nearly impossible for nature to completely break down. Instead of naturally decomposing, they break into microplstics that can enter the natural food chain.
The UK Governments Enviornmental Blog Team posted on a blog post in early May saying, “Say one disposable vape promises about 600 puffs – its plastic casing will easily last for 600 years buried in the earth”.
Ken explained that himself and his Guerrilla Gardening team often picked up disposable vapes before the ban took place but even now, after over two months of the ban, they are still having to pick up vape products from the environment.
He explained, “We are seeing fewer than before but they are still appearing.”
“I think it was right to implement the ban as they are very damaging to the environment and take many decades to preak down”.
Even when recycled, it is a difficult job disposing of the vapes. Due to containing many chemical components and not being designed to take apart, they usually have to be dissembled by hand at recycling centres which makes for a slow and difficult process that made it hard for the centres to keep up with the amount of vapes that they were receiving.
Aside from disposable vapes, Ken highlighted that there is an issue in Midlothian surrounding cigarette butts. Explaining that despite the council’s efforts to introduce new bins accross Midlothian, he still finds cigarette butt’s to be an issue.
“There are still a huge amount of cigarette butts around Midlothian. Midlothian Council, to their credit, have introduced new litter bins which are metal and more robust. They also have ashtrays built into the top of them.”
“We just need the public to use them. Sadly a lot of people think it is acceptable to put cigarette butts down street drains. This just ends up discharging into rivers or the sea, so again it is damaging the environment.”
Despite being much better at decomposing than vapes, cigarette butts can still take up to 12 years to degrade, containing up to 4,000 chemicals including hydrogen, cyanide and arsenic.
“Please always use the bins provided. Always hold on to your litter until you find a bin or take your rubbish home.”
“If people realised how much litter costs and is added to Council Tax they might be more careful!”
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