Public Health (Single-Use Vapes) Bill 2025: Second Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-28
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Sharon Keogan (IND), Industrial and Commercial Panel

I thank the Acting Chair. The Minister of State is very welcome to the Chamber. The objective of this Bill is sound and broadly shared across this House. Disposable vapes are wasteful, environmentally damaging and far too accessible to children and young people. The decision to remove them from the market is justified and overdue. However, as legislators our responsibility does not end with good intentions. It begins with asking whether the measures we put in place will deliver the outcomes we seek or whether, through gaps in design, they may create new problems while failing to solve the old one. It is fair to say the Bill before us is not one that turns on deep moral questions or contested legal principles but is rather technical public policy legislation aimed at achieving a practical objective and we should interrogate it as such.
That is why correspondence I received recently from the Irish Waste Management Association, IWMA, which I understand many other Senators also received, deserves careful attention. What it outlines is deeply concerning. While the IWMA fully supports the purpose of this Bill, it questions whether the current wording risks repeating the mistakes seen in other jurisdictions, especially the UK, where bans on single-use vapes were followed not by reduced harm or waste but by a shift in the market towards so-called multi-use devices. These devices, we are told, contain significantly larger lithium batteries, hold far more liquid and are often only marginally more expensive than disposable vapes. In practice, they become semi-disposable products that are heavier and more dangerous in the waste stream and far more likely to cause fires in bin lorries and recycling facilities. This is not a theoretical concern. Ireland’s waste sector has experienced repeated, devastating fires in recent years and the reading is quite shocking. Over the last five years at least eight major Irish waste and recycling facilities have suffered catastrophic fires, many of which were linked to lithium battery incidents, and these resulted in closures, rebuilds and severe capacity loss. Out of nine facilities sorting household dry recyclables, three are currently out of action due to fires.
Maybe, one more fire could tank our national capacity for recycling. This is unsurprising for anyone who is aware of the nature of lithium battery fires. These fires reach temperatures of up to 1,400°C. The released toxic gases are incredibly difficult to extinguish and can reignite even after being extinguished. To this end, banning single use vapes is a laudable and necessary measure as it is simply insanity that they should be so easily bought and then so easily thrown away into ordinary bins. However, if this Bill inadvertently accelerates the movement towards larger single-use battery devices then we will have succeeded in banning one product category while worsening the underlying environmental and safety risk. That would represent a failure of policy design, not because the aim was wrong but because the system effects were not fully thought through.
I will not ask to block or abandon this Bill but I ask quite reasonably for space and time to get the details right. I would like to ask whether the definition of "reusable" is robust enough to prevent manufacturers gaming the system, whether battery size, design and disposability should be addressed directly and ask whether producers responsible for end-of-life disposal should be made explicit rather than assumed. These are precisely the sort of questions that Committee Stage exists to answer. To this end, I will be looking to bring forward amendments that will attempt to address these issues. I invite the Government and all Members of the Chamber who are interested in contacting me to collaborate in making these amendments. For example, we could look at measures that distinguish genuine reusable products from quasi-disposables that take account of lithium battery fire risk and restrict certain battery sizes. We can also look at measures that mandate producers' responsibility for damages done to waste systems and perhaps even strengthening the existing penalties on those who throw these vapes into the wrong bins.
None of this delays the Bill. It simply ensures that we are not back here in two years' time legislating to fix a problem we could have anticipated today.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-04-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:52+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-28