Hansard

I recognise the strength of feeling on the issue in the Parliament and I thank everyone who will contribute today. The fact that we are so tight on time is heartening and points to how seriously the Parliament takes the issue.

I know that work is going on in many offices across the Parliament to tackle the issue, and I thank those who attended one or both of the round tables that I have chaired. I thank campaigners such as Laura Young, the Marine Conservation Society, ASH Scotland, Asthma + Lung UK, the British Heart Foundation, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Daily Record, The Inverness Courier and the many others who have helped and contributed to the campaign so far. There is more to do and more round tables to come, and I encourage everyone to join the discussion.

I thank the Scottish Government—particularly my colleague Lorna Slater—and Zero Waste Scotland for the work that was commissioned on the environmental impact of single-use vapes, which my motion mentions. The review estimated that the total emissions that were associated with single-use vapes in 2022 were between 3,375 and 4,292 tonnes of CO₂. That is the equivalent of the emissions from 2,100 cars on the road. It also showed that the weight of packaging and materials that are discarded as a result of single-use e-cigarette consumption in Scotland is between 800 and 1,000 tonnes a year. Other figures show that 1.3 million single-use vapes were thrown away every week in the United Kingdom last year, although that figure is likely to be far higher now.

This is a looming environmental catastrophe. Local authorities and waste-processing companies are concerned about the fire risk that is associated with the incorrect disposal of such devices. In addition, the devices are difficult to recycle, as they are made of mixed materials, and the lithium batteries are particularly resource intensive to make. Many discarded batteries are ending up on our beaches and in green spaces, as well as in our towns and cities. I have seen discarded batteries between cobbles in Edinburgh and at home in Falkirk. Some of our most iconic streets are being littered by the products, and the sheer number of them being thrown away is astonishing.

In the middle of a climate crisis, the last thing that we need is to have another polluting single-use product, and a ban on disposables is the minimum that we need in order to protect the planet. There are also issues with the packaging for refillable vapes, and we need to address that now to ensure that we are not merely moving the litter problem down the line.

There is an issue with illegal vapes. We do not know if they are any more environmentally damaging than others. Their composition is much more difficult to find, especially when new products come on the market. Preventing their importation by examining the current registration and licensing scheme should be a priority. We will need a four-nation approach to ensure that the importation of vapes is tracked. I will be writing to Scottish Government and United Kingdom Government ministers in the coming days to ask them to work with me on a way forward.

It is essential to consider the health, environmental, trading standards, licensing and regulation issues as a whole when we are dealing with single-use vapes. To reduce the number of vapes that are discarded, we need to help people to give up nicotine altogether; regulate, tax and license the products better; stop the supply of single-use vapes to young people; and—as I know is crucial for many members—prevent young people from being tempted to take up vaping. We need retailers to step up and do what they can to reduce the environmental and health impact of the products.

I wrote to retailers to ask them to put the products behind cover and to treat all nicotine-based products in the same way. I got very few responses. Those that I did receive said that retailers would wait to comply with whatever regulations were introduced.

We should be using our current regulation-making powers to make retailers put the products behind cover. We need to introduce plain packaging, and ensure that flavours are removed or restricted heavily, so that we do not have blue bubble gum, candyfloss or rainbow unicorn, to name a few. I expect that, in discussing flavours, we will hear the usual cries that adults enjoy colours and flavours, too. This may be coming from me—someone who loves a pick-’n’-mix or two—but I know no adult who would be influenced by the name “Rainbow Unicorn” to try a vape. However, I do know plenty of young children who would be tempted by it. Advertising and the presence of the products in television programmes and social media needs to be taken seriously, and I am grateful to the Advertising Standards Authority for—it wrote to me in the past couple of days detailing this—the action that it is already taking to address that. We need to remain vigilant, however.

We often get branded as killjoys when we try to good things in environmental and public health policy areas, and we may be seen as stopping people from doing things that they enjoy, but the issue is far too important for us to be worried about being seen in that way, and I encourage colleagues from all parties to take a bold stance on the matter. For the sake of the environment and—importantly for all of us—for the sake of the health and wellbeing of today’s children and young people, that has to be done. They should have been the generation with the lowest-ever rate of nicotine addiction. That is still absolutely achievable but only if all of us put their needs at the forefront of our minds.