By Jeff Eckenrode

Quick Answer: What happens to a disposable vape after you throw it away? Most end up in landfills for decades, because the plastic body and lithium battery are sealed together and almost impossible to recycle. Bacon's Grease disposable vape cartridges fix this two ways: the oil tanker detaches and is biodegradable, and Hashtag Cannabis in Redmond takes the battery back for recycling, so nothing from the device goes to waste.

Have you ever wondered what really happens to a disposable vape after you toss it in the trash?

It doesn't just disappear. The plastic shell can take hundreds of years to break down, and buried inside it is a small lithium-ion battery that was never meant to sit in a landfill.

Image credit: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

How Bad Is The Problem?

Nationwide, an estimated nearly 500,000 disposable vapes are thrown away every single day in the U.S., a sharp increase from previous years as manufacturers keep adding features that make the devices even harder to responsibly dispose of.

Researchers at the University of Oxford found something even more frustrating about this waste. Their study showed that the lithium-ion batteries inside disposable vapes are discarded after a single use, even though those same batteries are built to handle hundreds of charge cycles. In other words, we're throwing away batteries that still have most of their working life left.

This poses a genuine public safety hazard, especially as disposable vapes (cannabis and otherwise) grow in popularity across the U.S. Lithium-ion batteries mixed in with regular trash can spark fires at waste facilities, and federal regulators have documented this happening repeatedly. A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report identified 245 fires between 2013 and 2020 that were caused, or likely caused, by lithium-ion batteries at facilities like garbage trucks and waste warehouses. That's the hidden cost of a product built to be used once and forgotten.

So where does that leave you, as someone who actually enjoys a disposable vape for its convenience? You don't have to choose between convenience and doing right by the planet. You just have to know which products are built to solve this growing problem.

Why Most Disposable Vapes Are So Hard to Recycle

The core issue is design, not laziness on the consumer's part.

A standard disposable vape fuses its battery, its heating element, and its oil chamber into one sealed unit. Once the oil is gone, the whole thing usually gets thrown away as a single piece, battery and all, because there's no easy way to separate the parts. Most municipal recycling programs won't take it, and most people don't have a battery-specific drop-off point nearby, so the device ends up in a landfill by default.

That single design decision, fusing the battery to the rest of the device, is really the root of the entire disposable vape waste problem.

How Bacon’s Buds Built a Disposable Vape Differently

This is where Bacon's Grease, the disposable vape line from Bacon's Buds, takes a different approach. Instead of sealing the battery and the oil tanker together permanently, the two components are designed to separate.

Here's how it works in practice: once you've finished the oil in a Bacon's Grease disposable, you detach the tanker from the battery. The tanker itself is biodegradable, so it doesn't carry the same multi-decade landfill lifespan as a standard sealed vape body. That leaves just the battery, which is the one component that actually needs specialized handling.

That's a meaningfully different design philosophy than most disposables on the market, where you're stuck disposing of the entire unit as hazardous e-waste with no easy way to separate the parts.

What to Do With the Battery

Once the tanker is off, the battery still needs somewhere responsible to go, and this is the second half of what makes Bacon's Grease worth highlighting. Bacon's Buds runs an active battery recycling program, and Hashtag Cannabis in Redmond participates in it directly.

Bring your spent Bacon's Grease battery into the shop, and we'll make sure it gets into proper recycling instead of a landfill or, worse, a garbage truck where it could spark a fire.

It's a small habit, dropping off one battery, but it closes the loop that most disposable vapes leave wide open.

Where Can I Find Bacon's Grease in Redmond?

At Hashtag Cannabis in Redmond, we’re proud to offer eco-friendly products by Bacon's Buds.

Their Bacon’s Grease Disposable Vape Cartridge was specially designed to reduce waste without sacrificing performance.

What Makes Bacon's Buds Special?

Bacon's Buds has been growing cannabis since 2014, long before recreational legalization in Washington, and their roots are in organic living soil cultivation. Every plant is grown in certified organic living soil, tested and re-amended after each crop, and protected with organic pest prevention instead of synthetic chemicals.

That same care carries over into their Bacon's Grease rosin line, made solventlessly by pressing ice water hash between heated plates, and into their live resin cartridges, which use 100 percent live resin with no color remediation additives.

The Bacon's Grease Disposable Vape Cartridge is a newer addition, built specifically to apply that same "nature fully expressed" philosophy to a product category that's historically been anything but sustainable.

Learn more by visiting their website at: https://www.baconsbuds.com/

Stop by Hashtag Cannabis in Redmond to shop Bacon's Grease and to drop off your spent batteries to be recycled too!

Shop Redmond Hashtag

FAQ about Disposable Vape Waste

What happens to disposable vapes after you throw them away?
Most disposable vapes end up in landfills, where the plastic casing can take hundreds of years to break down. The lithium-ion battery inside is often still fused to the rest of the device, so it can't easily be recycled and ends up sitting in the landfill along with everything else, or worse, mixed into regular waste streams where it poses a fire risk.

Why are disposable vape batteries dangerous in the trash?
Lithium-ion batteries can short-circuit and ignite when they're crushed or damaged, which happens often at waste processing facilities. Federal regulators have tied hundreds of waste facility fires to lithium-ion batteries specifically, since these batteries aren't designed to be tossed in with regular garbage.

Can disposable vape batteries be recycled?
Yes, but only through specific battery recycling channels, not standard curbside recycling or household trash. That's why battery take-back programs, like the one Bacon's Buds runs, matter so much. Without a dedicated drop-off point, most people have no practical way to recycle the battery even if they want to.

What makes the Bacon's Grease disposable vape different from other disposables?
The Bacon's Grease disposable vape separates into two parts once the oil is used up. The oil tanker detaches from the battery and is biodegradable, so it doesn't linger in a landfill for decades the way a standard vape shell does. That leaves only the battery needing special handling.

Where can I recycle a Bacon's Grease vape battery in Redmond?
Hashtag Cannabis, located at 7829 Leary Way NE in Redmond, accepts spent Bacon's Grease batteries as part of Bacon's Buds' active battery recycling program. Just bring the battery in after detaching it from the biodegradable tanker.

Are eco-friendly disposable vapes actually better for the environment?
It depends on the design. A disposable vape only reduces its environmental footprint if it addresses both major waste sources: the plastic and electronic casing, and the lithium-ion battery. Products like the Bacon's Grease disposable, which separate a biodegradable tanker from a recyclable battery, address both, which is a meaningfully different outcome than a standard sealed disposable.

Want to learn more about vapes, cartridges, and cannabis regulation in Washington state?

Then check out our collection of related posts here!

Explore our full Vapes & Cartridges hub or our Washington State Cannabis Laws hub for more.

The Disposable Vape Waste Problem