Nobody designed a way out of this. Disposable vapes arrived faster than any system built to handle them, and the organisations below stepped into that gap — mostly small, mostly volunteer-run, mostly funded by donations.
They're doing it on behalf of consumers who were sold a sealed, glued-shut product with a rechargeable battery inside and no legal way to open it, service it, or return it. That's the same argument the right-to-repair movement has been making about phones and tractors for a decade: when a product can't be opened, the waste isn't the user's fault — it's the design's.
The regulatory picture is genuinely contradictory. The FDA has said e-cigarette and e-liquid waste should be handled as household hazardous waste. The EPA has ruled vape products exempt from household hazardous waste guidelines.
There is still no standardised way to recycle e-cigarettes in the United States, and limited federal guidance on handling them safely. Which is why a convenience store in Marquette and a nonprofit in Queens are currently doing the job that policy hasn't.
Places collection bins with businesses, schools and community organisations, then handles safe disposal and recycling of what comes back. Runs an education programme alongside it, on the grounds that most people genuinely don't know a vape is a battery.
Their stated position is that there's currently no standardised way to recycle e-cigarettes in the U.S., and they're trying to set the handling standard rather than wait for one. They've been developing an incentive scheme that would credit people for returning used devices.
Runs labelled collection bins through partner shops and hosts public collection drives at festivals, fairs, schools and community centres. A mail-back programme for people outside their drop-off zones is in development.
They take disposable vapes of any brand or size, rechargeable and non-rechargeable, and broken or leaking devices. Collected material is sorted, moved in DOT-compliant packaging by trained handlers, and sent to certified facilities that depower and disassemble the cells to recover metals. They publish weights and outcomes for transparency.
Not accepted: refillable mods, e-liquids, or household trash.
The clearest proof that this works at small scale. Started in December 2024 with a single collection bucket in one corner store, expanded through 2025 with help from local donors and Circle K, and added cannabis vape collection in early 2026.
In May 2026 the Superior Watershed Partnership absorbed the pilot into its permanent e-waste programme — a volunteer project that became infrastructure. The group also works on wetland protection and mining accountability across the region.
Runs a long-standing electronic waste recycling programme across the Upper Peninsula. In May 2026 it took on the Marquette County vape collection pilot permanently, which is what turned a volunteer experiment into a service that will still exist next year.
Its Climate Office in Marquette is a drop-off point for both nicotine and cannabis devices, open Wednesdays 12–4pm.
A year-long pilot running September 2025 through August 2026, led by the Center for Sustainable Materials Management at SUNY ESF together with the Product Stewardship Institute. It's researching and testing how a statewide collection system could actually work — through hazardous waste facilities and retailers — rather than running one permanently.
This is the piece that could make everything else unnecessary. If it establishes a workable model, collection stops depending on whether a nonprofit happens to operate in your county.
Works upstream of collection, on the policy that decides who pays for it. PSI builds pilot collection systems with states and counties, then uses the results to argue for producer responsibility — the principle that manufacturers, not municipalities or volunteers, should fund the disposal of what they sell.
Current vape work includes the New York pilot, programmes in Missouri and Oklahoma, and technical advice to Boulder County, Colorado. No drop-off of their own, but the most direct route to the problem's actual cause.
Occasional hands-on workshops that strip discarded vapes and rebuild them into synthesisers. It isn't a collection programme, and it won't scale — but it's the most literal expression of the argument: these are functional electronics, and treating them as disposable is a choice rather than a property of the object.