Tiny standards in legislation (I'm looking at you EU) around the e-cig designs to ensure simple battery recycling would solve this. Then you make the consumer pay for the battery separately and you are done.
Also could work for other e-waste (phones, tablets, etc.). For some goods like washing machines, this is already common. Extending that to other product categories might be doable.
It does put some additional work on shop owners that have to pay back those deposits and collect them. Which means additional bookkeeping and some mechanism that ensures they don't end up in the negative on deposits for goods bought in another shop. And of course the extra deposit means prices go up as well. Even if you get it back at the end of the product life, it is extra cost.
Vapes being thrown away casually on the street has a bigger underlying problem of littering not really having any consequences. Some people just dump their trash wherever and it's just considered normal (by them). Some big fines would be appropriate here in my view. It's negative behavior. It's easy to know when you are doing it wrong and pretty much inexcusable. The only reason people do this is that they are being sloppy and don't really care. If you are caught red handed dropping your trash where you shouldn't, it should have some consequences. I'm not a fan of the nanny state but this is an area where I wouldn't mind people being corrected quite a bit more than they currently are. I don't think this should be that controversial.
Our whole team had to explain to them how this is littering and that isn't why those people exist.
And yes, this is what they had been told since they were a child.
Other than criminal enforcement, I'm not sure how you'd meaningfully change the incentives for someone who is willing to throw a £5 electrical device in the gutter because they can't be bothered to take it home, recharge it and refill it with £0.20 worth of liquid.
Here in Denmark we are forced to pay a small deposit when buying bottles/cans of beverages, which is returned (in cash) when you return the bottle. The consequence is that you find zero beverage bottles lying around, since they’re collected and redeemed.
If we put a, say, similar $10 deposit on these vapes, I think we’d see the same effect here. One problem is that they’re smaller, so they’re harder to find for collectors.
I'm being somewhat tongue in cheek, this still exists but I don't understand why they don't make lithium batteries in AA / AAA size or whatever for things like vapes. Battery collection, replacement and recycling is / was a solved problem.
That's still not optimal at all, if they had any imagination we'd have
- standard e-cig bases
- powered by a 18650/AA/AAA depending on the model
- deposit on the consumable part
That way you get rid of single use battery and littering all at once.