In a lot of Ontario homes there is a bag, a jar or an old shoebox of dead batteries waiting for a trip to the depot. The AAs from the TV remote go in it, along with the 9-volt from the smoke detector and the coin cell from the car key fob, sometimes with a strip of masking tape over the ends of the lithium ones.
That habit took years to build. Batteries can’t go in the Blue Box, so the province relies on people dropping them off for free at retail stores and municipal depots, and dozens of municipalities now collect them at the curb as well. Most people have heard the message at least once: batteries are worth recycling, and they don’t belong in the garbage.
Which makes one gap stand out. The battery that has waste and recycling operators most worried these days is not the AA in the jar. It is the one sealed inside a disposable vape, and in a lot of homes it never gets near the jar. It sits in a cupholder until someone tosses it in the kitchen garbage.
A battery that doesn’t look like one
Part of the problem is that a disposable vape doesn’t look like a battery. It looks more like a lighter or a highlighter: a sealed shell you use until it stops working and then throw away. Nothing on the outside suggests otherwise.
The inside tells a different story. Most of the space goes to two things, a reservoir of liquid and a lithium-ion cell. Around them sit a small circuit board, a sensor that switches the device on when you inhale, a heating coil and a bit of cotton. Once the device is in the trash, the cell is the only part that matters.
These cells are not tiny. The top-selling disposable at one Ontario vape chain this past summer carries an 850 milliamp-hour battery, roughly a fifth to a quarter of what is inside a typical smartphone. Nobody would drop a phone in the kitchen garbage. People do it with vapes every day, because “disposable” is what everyone calls them.
What happens in the truck
A lithium-ion cell is perfectly safe as long as it stays in one piece. The trouble starts when it is crushed or punctured. Damage to the thin layers inside can short the cell, which heats it, which damages more of it, a chain reaction known as thermal runaway. A cell in that state can burn hot enough to ignite whatever is packed around it, and household garbage is mostly things that burn.
The back of a garbage truck is close to the worst place for that to happen. Loads are compacted again and again over the course of a route, and a crushed vape can smoulder in the middle of a packed load until the driver smells smoke. Recycling plants face the same risk on a larger scale, with conveyor belts, shredders and tightly baled cardboard. Whether a town’s garbage ends up in a landfill or an energy-from-waste plant, the crushing happens long before it gets there.
The industry has started to put numbers to it. Ryan Fogelman of Fire Rover, a company that has tracked publicly reported fires at waste and recycling facilities in the United States and Canada since 2016, counted 56 of them in July 2025, the most ever recorded in a single month. He has a name for the stubborn rise in the baseline: the “vape effect.”
Some places have concluded that the product itself is the problem. British councils have spent years warning residents about vapes setting their bin lorries on fire, and some now put dedicated vape drop-off containers in their recycling centres. In June 2025 the United Kingdom went further and banned the sale of single-use vapes outright. Under the British rules, a legal vape has to be refillable and rechargeable, and if it has a coil, the coil has to be replaceable. Canada has no such ban, so for now the decision about where a dead device ends up rests with whoever is holding it.
‘Disposable’ describes the product, not the battery
The oddest part of the story is that the battery inside a disposable vape usually isn’t disposable at all. In a study published in the journal Joule in December 2023, researchers at University College London and the University of Oxford removed cells from disposable vapes and tested them with the same methods used on electric vehicle batteries. The cells could be charged and discharged more than 450 times and still hold a useful charge. Most are thrown out after the first.
Canada’s share of that waste adds up. Research by Emily Shilton at the University of British Columbia estimated that more than two million kilograms of lithium batteries from vapes end up in Canadian landfills every year, about the weight of 1,000 mid-sized cars. Nearly all of them got there the same way, in a garbage bag, under a compactor blade.
What to do with the one in your drawer
Ontario’s battery drop-off network is built for loose batteries: AAs through Ds, 9-volts, button cells and the replacement batteries for tools, phones and laptops. A vape is a device with its battery sealed inside, so it isn’t on that list, and it isn’t among the examples on the province’s electronics list either. It falls into a gap between the two programs.
The safest route is usually your municipality’s household hazardous waste depot, the same place that takes old paint and household chemicals. Most depots accept batteries and electronics, and a dead vape is a little of both. Policies vary from town to town, so check your municipality’s waste page or ask the attendant when you pull in. The province’s Ontario Recycles map lists depots and retail drop-off points for batteries and electronics near you.
Until you make the trip, store dead vapes the way you would any battery you are worried about. A glass jar or a small lidded tin in a cool spot works well, away from the stove and out of direct sun. Don’t try to pry the battery out, since puncturing the cell is the very thing the truck does. If a device is swollen, warm or leaking, it should go to a depot sooner rather than later. And keep vapes out of the Blue Box. They aren’t packaging, and a crushed lithium cell in a recycling load is what sorting plants are working hardest to keep out.
Plenty of households already make the occasional run with burnt-out compact fluorescent bulbs or an old laptop. The vape jar can ride along on the same trip.
Buying fewer of them
The bigger fix happens before a device is ever thrown out, and it comes down to how many get bought in the first place.
For people who vape every day, a refillable pod device is the lowest-waste option. The battery stays in your pocket for many months, and what gets thrown away is a small pod or coil rather than a lithium cell.
For those who prefer disposables, size matters more than shoppers tend to realize. A small early-style disposable, with a couple of millilitres of liquid and no charging port, goes in the garbage when either the liquid or the battery runs out. Many of today’s larger models hold 20 or 30 millilitres and recharge over USB-C, so one battery lasts through ten times as much liquid or more. Over a year, that adds up to far fewer cells headed for the curb. The number worth comparing on the box is the liquid capacity in millilitres, and whether the device charges, rather than the puff count printed in large type on the front.
The 850 milliamp-hour figure from earlier comes from Vape Cloud, an Ontario chain with more than two dozen stores. Its guide to disposable vapes ranks devices by what customers actually buy and lists the battery size and liquid capacity beside them, which is exactly the comparison that matters here.
Ontario has spent years teaching people to keep batteries out of the garbage. The next step is a small one: recognizing that the thing in the cupholder is a battery too.