Signs along the corridors of the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham warn: “No vaping until inside the show.” But inside Europe’s largest industry expo for vaping, it’s open season. For three days in May, nearly everyone at Vaper Expo UK is vaping nearly all the time.
Visitors, about 20,000 in all, vape their way from one stand to the next, trying the samples with the use of disposable silicon mouthpieces in a nod towards sanitariness. Staff representing the hundreds of exhibitors join them, like car salesmen revving up the engines on a garage forecourt. At one point, a rep has to retire mid-conversation, dizzy from all the inhaling and, like a fallen infantryman, is replaced by the next man in the corps. Even the toilets offer no respite; vapour plumes rise from the cubicles like smoke from the chimneys of a Victorian terrace.
At the UK’s first vaping expo, Vape Jam UK, held in London back in 2015, the venue’s ceilings were too low to cope with all the vapour, John Dunne, director-general of the UK Vaping Industry Association, tells me. He was working as a sales rep at the time. Within an hour, he remembers, there was a pea-soup fog so thick “you literally put your hand in front of you and you couldn’t see it”.
That was the era of the hobbyist, the vaping stone age. People queued to get into trade shows holding vapes the size of bricks. If you could find a pocket big enough, which you often couldn’t, they slanted you to the side. When they didn’t leak, which they often did, they produced vapour like erupting volcanoes. Enthusiasts, drawn to vaping as much for reasons of cost as health concerns, would even make their own prototypes, sometimes with disastrous consequences. “They’d blow up,” says Gary Chapman, who runs the YouTube channel Gary Vapes. “In the very beginning, you’d see that happening quite a bit, which was a shame. It gave vaping a bad name.”
Those early devices had a surprising amount to recommend them, though. They were rechargeable, refillable and relatively environmentally friendly. Known as “open systems”, they were designed to be refilled with “e-liquid”, a nicotine-laced solution that is heated to make vapour.
Today, you can buy non-exploding, leather-bound versions of the old-school devices that are equipped with LED screens and no bigger than a cigar. But they are hard to find at the expo. Instead, visitors confront rank after rank of multicoloured, plastic single-use vapes. Disposables, as they are known, line the fronts of nearly every exhibitor display like children’s crayons, as far as the clouds of vapour allow the eye to see.
This is the Vaper Expo’s eighth year. In that time, vaping has gone from a niche pursuit designed to help you quit smoking to a $27bn global industry that, critics argue, has simply given nicotine addiction a more accessible, artificially flavoured form. As it moved into the mainstream, the industry has transformed completely. The same technological advances that made rechargeable devices pocketable are now threatening to make them obsolete.
In some ways, the future of vaping is a near-perfect product: cheap, instant, leaving you always wanting another. A lot like a cigarette. As teens take up vaping disposables in record numbers and landfills fill with electronic waste, that perfected product is in danger of taking the rest of the industry down with it.
“They’re garbage,” says Jonathan Mosemann. “They’re garbage from the beginning.” Lip-pierced and mohawked, Mosemann runs Overkill Mods, specialising in bespoke, one-off vape models. The company’s slogan is “Crafting excellence. One vape at a time.” Most of his customers are collectors. Along with selling vapes the size of Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes (“No, they’re not practical at all”), Mosemann recalls fondly the vape he made for a customer who had lost a son: a 3D version of a tattoo the boy had, which included the date of his passing. “I found that very moving. I’m going to create something someone will hold on to for the rest of their lives.”
Disposable vapes pose an existential threat to that kind of business model. Almost non-existent a couple of years ago, they went from about 5 per cent of the UK market in 2021 to 40 per cent in just six months, according to Dunne’s estimates. He projects they are currently at about 70 per cent. (Overall vape sales in the UK accounted for more than £1.3bn in 2021.)
At the show, the animosity between the open-system purists and the new wave of disposable sellers, mostly from China, is roughly that of restaurant owners watching a food industry being overtaken by microwave meals. All the new products boast “2ml capacity!” and “600 puffs!”, as though these were unique selling points. (The first is the maximum volume allowed by the UK government and the second refers to the total drags of vapour before the device runs out.) Most contain 20mg/ml of nicotine — also the legal limit — and roughly equivalent to two packs of cigarettes. There’s not a lot to separate them, though that doesn’t stop manufacturers from trying. “Consistent taste of real flavours,” claims one. “Contrast colour,” boasts another. My favourite: “Good for fashion matching!”
Disposables are sold everywhere. Free of tobacco’s stricter licensing regulations, vapes can infiltrate almost any retail environment. Mobile phone shops are becoming vape shops. Hairdressers and hardware stores sell them on the side. Fried-chicken outlets across the country are not beyond asking, after sliding a box of wings over the counter, if you want a vape with that. Supermarkets, which are required by law to keep tobacco products behind sliding doors, may freely display all the vapes of the rainbow. The buyer from one major supermarket, Dunne tells me, decided on their selection over a fry-up. (We’ve got 28 slots, Dunne remembers him saying to leading figures from the industry. What do we put in them that will maximise our return?)
As the disposable vape market grows, so do the preconditions for a moral panic about their dangers. The government has grand plans for a smoke-free England by 2030 — defined as when smoking rates in adults fall below 5 per cent. But does the presence of more vapers (about 8.3 per cent of Brits according to a survey from last year) really amount to fewer smokers? Or simply a new cohort of nicotine addicts who might never have smoked at all? The legal age to buy vapes in the UK is 18 years old, but a survey from this year commissioned by the charity Action on Smoking and Health found 20.5 per cent of children have tried vaping, up from 15.8 per cent in 2022. Disposables are the most common type of device used by that age group.
Then there’s the environmental cost. One study from recycling non-profit Material Focus found we are currently throwing away around 1.3 million disposable vapes per week in the UK, which amounts to two every second. That’s enough lithium to make about 1,200 electric-car batteries over the course of a year.
At the Vaper Expo in mid-May, amid thumping Calvin Harris tracks, the concern was more philosophical. Even vape sellers were worried that disposables were giving the industry such a bad name it would lead the UK to either ban vaping almost entirely, as the Australian government did this year, or to ban all flavours in rechargeable vapes apart from menthol and tobacco, as the US did in 2020. Both courses of action could end in smokers returning to cigarettes, vape sellers worry.
The only recent action the UK government has taken has been closing a loophole that meant it was perfectly legal for companies to give away free vape samples to children of any age. “No more free vapes for kids,” read the announcement posted on a government website a couple of weeks after the expo. But the industry has seen more ominous signs this year.
In May, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak spoke approvingly of the creation of a £3mn “new illicit vape enforcement squad”. A select committee inquiry on youth vaping was scheduled for the end of June. Conservative MP and consultant paediatrician Dr Caroline Johnson was leading the charge to get vapes out of the hands of children. At the inquiry she would frame the question starkly: was it society’s job to protect adult smokers from the bad choices they had made years ago, or to protect children from forming a new addiction?
If vapes are no longer seen as a gateway to giving up altogether, then the implication is obvious: the industry could be cast as a villain in the same mould as the old enemy, Big Tobacco.
Most in the vape industry will tell you flavour is essential and that, while the vape-curious will often start with a tobacco flavour after quitting cigarettes, they soon find their taste buds leading them to a road-to-Damascus moment. Critics of the vaping industry will say flavours like Unicorn Shake (“You’ll get milky and creamy flavours on the inhale, followed by sweet strawberry and banana on the exhale”) are not being marketed to ex-smokers, but to kids. It’s possible that both claims are true.
Developing the perfect flavour is something of an obsession for everyone in the vaping world. Cracking the right one is less like inventing the age-old formula for Coca-Cola and more like trying to product launch a trending topic. It was why, many in the industry told me, Big Tobacco had yet to gain a foothold. According to Euromonitor International, independent companies make up 63.8 per cent of the global market for vape sales. That figure is probably conservative due to thriving black markets.
Tobacco companies have been attempting to break into the world of vaping for more than a decade, with less success than might be expected. The likes of Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International all have their own vaping brands, with names such as Veev and Vuse. Many were acquired or repurposed from vaping start-ups, yet none were present at the expo.
I got the feeling they would not have been welcome, had they come. At the early shows, vaping companies would actively protest Big Tobacco’s involvement. “They would go insane at the organisers,” says Dunne. “There was that much hatred.”
Perhaps to their detriment, the big brands focused on supplying convenience stores and limited the range of flavours they offered, says Dunne. “By the time they bring out their marketing campaign, the vaping guys have moved on to something else.”
Nowhere is that creative agility more evident than at the industry’s flagship prize-giving ceremony. The Vapouround Awards, considered the Oscars of the vaping world, are held in the National Motorcycle Museum, a short drive from the Vaper Expo. The awards recognise everything from best e-liquid flavour (Best Dessert, Best Beverage, Best Fruit) to Best Tank DTL (the part of an open system into which you squeeze your e-liquid). At this year’s ceremony, most of the attendees vaped. A lone cigarette smoker was the subject of mockery.
The winning flavours didn’t just represent the baffling degree of chemical engineering that now goes into e-liquids. They were also a sign of how global the vaping industry has become. Tigris’s Blueberry Donut (Best Dessert) hailed from Malaysia. Vapes Bars’ Diamond Mint Mojito (Best Beverage) came from the Middle East. Jam Monster’s Mixed Berry (Best Fruit) was an American creation. Frank & Atticus’s Apple Nectarine (Best Menthol — I’m told it contained just enough not to be disqualified) came from Australia. All the winners turned up. The category of Best Disposable, which didn’t exist two years ago, was won by Kiwi’s Kiwi Go, which is not, as you might expect, from New Zealand, but Italy.
Judging had taken place at Vapouround Media’s Derby headquarters, where it produces a bimonthly industry magazine, and where four hardy souls — two industry figures, two You-Tuber vapers — had inhaled for four days solid to make their picks. “We’d get there quite early and wouldn’t leave until 5pm. It was a proper shift,” says Chapman of Gary Vapes, one of the judges. Imbibing so much nicotine took its toll, he adds. “My scores always went down as the day wore on.” Adam Winch, of YouTube channel The Green Winch, told me he had no such issues and happily vaped on the walk back to his hotel room.
For the manufacturers, the considerations multiply across borders. In the UK, apparently, we prefer fruit flavours, but often in combination (Watermelon Apple), and increasingly with menthol (Strawberry Grape Ice) or an element of tang (Sour Blue Raspberry). In the US, where the flavour ban has only succeeded in fostering a fruity black market, vapers prefer flavours so sweet that “you can feel the sugar on your teeth”, as Rob Harvey of Flonq, an e-cigarette maker, put it to me. Germans prefer single-fruit flavours. Asian consumers prefer minty ones. In the Middle East, it’s all about rose petal variants, shisha-style. But I’m told “energy drink” flavour is about to go viral.
Italian vapers are too macho for taste and drive the only market that opts for tobacco-flavoured vaping by choice. There are, naturally, differences within a given country. London’s vapers prefer sweet fruits, but Manchester leans zestier, like lemon and lime. “In London, no one will buy
it,” says Amarjeet Singh of vape-maker Twister Bar, referring to the citrus variety. In Newcastle, they prefer pastry flavours, like blackberry crumble, or jam roly-poly.
Dessert flavours, I’m told, are the hardest to crack, in part because the chemical previously used for the creamy flavouring, diacetyl, was banned from vapes in 2016. But nearly everyone in e-liquids agrees that single-use vapes are overly sweet, that even if they weren’t directly marketed at teens, they were at least teen-adjacent. “It’s like they’re changing everyone’s palates,” Jack Tidy, of e-liquid company Pod Salt, put it to me gravely.
The person who creates a convincing chocolate, it’s said, will make a fortune. “That’s the holy grail,” says Christina Carus of e-liquid company Black Rose Elixirs, which specialises in “grown-up” flavours like tiramisu — its booth at the expo was done up like a Victorian gentleman’s club. “People say they’ve done it. They haven’t.”
You might think there is limited room for technical innovation in the low-cost world of disposable vapes. They do, after all, rely on little more than a battery, a metal coil that heats the e-liquid and the ability of a customer to draw breath. You would be wrong.
In a landscape of identical rainbow-bright sticks, even switching to a more sophisticated hue is seen as a radical move. “It’s clean, it’s elegant, it works,” Mehmet Altay of Saltica says of his company’s curved, Apple-white device, which does have the unfortunate side effect of resembling a tampon. Gold Bars had the same idea, but with a bit more bling. (“Feel the aluminium-alloy shell in your hand,” their sales rep, Alex Althaus, beseeches me.)
There are disposable vapes that partner with celebrities (Insta Puff’s rep tells me it just began a collaboration with ex-footballer Ronaldinho) and disposable vapes in the style of concept cars (Upends were launching the Upbar GT, “the world’s first car concept disposable vape”). One, dubbed Aquios, even claimed to reduce feelings of dehydration as you vape. “It’s mixed with water,” their rep, Grace Ehis, explains. “Compare this to any other vape — you have to drink quicker compared to ours.”
At the Vaporesso stand, the company is launching a vape that comes in camouflage. (“So we can help people in warzones,” the presenter says, although I can’t help wondering if the vapour might be a giveaway.) Flonq’s rechargeable Flonq X, which isn’t a disposable model, pairs with an app on your phone, informing you just how much you’ve vaped that day, or week, or month — the Strava of nicotine consumption.
Then there are the disposable vapes shaped like fast-food cups, which take pride of place on several stands. (You inhale through the bendy straw.) “We are not allowed to sell this in the UK,” says Jason Pan of Maskking, one of the companies that makes them. “It is too attractive to children.” When I ask where they are sold, he says, “Dubai, but many other countries too.”
On the show’s second day, I attend the launch of FeelM’s latest disposable, the FeelM Max. FeelM is claiming a remarkable feat in the disposable-vape world: breaking the 600-puff barrier. Thanks to its new ceramic coil technology, the FeelM Max can provide 800 puffs. On stage, Zhang Ni, FeelM’s assistant president, introduces a video of Silicon Valley-style slickness and speaks of the years of “technology innovation” that have made this possible.
To an outsider, though, it is hard not to appreciate the irony. FeelM has extended the life of a single-use product by 30 per cent. Yet if it had been designed as a rechargeable vape, it could have been used 500 times or more.
Later, I find myself among a gaggle of vaping influencers taking part in a “taste session” for the device. We are to assess the FeelM Max’s longevity by comparing it with a leading rival at the 150-puff mark. I must look alarmed because it is gently explained to me that both vapes set in front of me for testing have been “machine vaped” to this point already. Thankfully, I won’t be required to do the legwork.
John Dunne can remember quite clearly the fervour of the early Vaper Expo shows. Dunne, who became director-general of the UK Vaping Industry Association in 2016, has a large shaven head, the build of an ex boxer and enough bonhomie to make claims that his industry is saving lives sound reasonable. Dunne used to work for tobacco companies in the US until, he tells me, his daughter came home from school one day and asked him, “Daddy, why do you kill people for a living?” He’s worked in vaping ever since.
At this year’s show, a stage at the rear saw two compères — Johnnie Lovell (favourite flavour: Strawberry Cheesecake) and Ashley Hansen (Strawberry, but lately with a dash of Mango) — throw free samples of disposable vapes to an excited crowd, who catch them in outstretched caps. They used to do the same thing back when the show was dominated by the hefty old open-system devices, Dunne tells me — the ones made of metal and glass. “You’d have blood everywhere.”
After attending these events, people would end up with hauls of devices so valuable, he says, that a lady in a wheelchair was once mugged for them on her way out. “The industry has totally changed,” Dunne says, with a touch of melancholy, when we meet for lunch at his local pub in south-west London.
The rise of disposable vapes is part opportunism, part accident. When the US Food and Drug Administration launched a crackdown on vaping in 2020 — banning most flavours and forcing companies to undergo a lengthy and expensive application process — it neglected to include “closed-system” devices or, as we know them, disposables. Chinese companies, spotting the loophole, quickly shifted gear. The advancement in technology meant these were much more satisfying to smokers than the throat-catching “cigalikes” from a decade earlier. The era of the disposable vape was born.
The irony of China dominating the new vaping world was not lost on most at the expo. Neither Lost Mary or Elf Bar, which combined account for more than half of all vapes sold in the UK, had a stand there. Vaping of any flavour except tobacco is banned in China, legislation that is not unrelated to the fact that the state-owned China Tobacco logged $204bn in profits last year, approaching the size of China’s entire military budget.
Dunne recalls a Chinese manufacturer at the show who asked if he could join the industry group. No, Dunne told him, “because you have kittens on your shit”. The manufacturer protested that kittens were cute. “Yes, kittens are cute,” Dunne remembers saying, “for 12-year-olds.”
Dunne is fond of portraying himself this way: the white knight trying to save the UK vaping industry from itself. Over the course of our lunch, he regales me with stories. There was the time he saw a full-page ad for a vape shaped like a lollipop in a trade magazine and phoned the editor to scream at him. Or the times he’s heard about a wholesaler importing illegal disposable vapes (10,000-puff devices filled with e-liquid many times over the UK’s limits) and taken two burly men from the office with him to have a word. (“I’m risking my life going there, but I tell them I’ll put them out of business unless they change.”)
Yet Dunne, perhaps predictably, wants less regulation on disposable vapes, not more. At least when it comes to the amount of e-liquid allowed in them. His argument is not without logic: if you double or even triple the 2ml limit on a disposable vape, the battery size barely needs to change, a fact that shows just how wasteful the current set-up is. The price of such a vape, he says, could be £15, instead of £5, taking it out of pocket-money territory.
At the expo, various brands were promoting disposable vapes with removable batteries (for easier recycling) or others that came with extra pods built in (you rotated the device to use each one, like a revolver). All were tantalising close to inventing a device that already exists. Known as “closed-pod systems”, these were the main alternative to open-system devices before the arrival of the disposable. A mouthpiece containing e-liquid detaches from the device once spent, and the device itself has a charging port. This set-up has dwindled to a fraction of sales in the UK; no one wants the hassle of plugging something in. Disposables seem to have fostered a curious and possibly irreversible mindset, that an electronic, battery-powered device is something that should be both instant to use and just as instantly thrown away.
We do not yet know, and perhaps won’t for a generation, the truth about the health dangers of vaping. An oft-cited evidence review from Public Health England claims the practice is 95 per cent less harmful than smoking cigarettes. Vaping, after all, produces neither tar nor carbon monoxide, the two most harmful elements in tobacco smoke. But that statistic has come under considerable scrutiny. Critics argue that we still know far too little. “The evidence [for the 95 per cent statement] is exactly zero,” says professor Andrew Bush, a consultant paediatric chest physician at the Royal Brompton Hospital in west London. “It takes 30 years to do a 30-year study. We simply don’t know what the long-term effects are.
Scare stories abound. About vapes laced with nail-polish remover or of a teen who was forced to have a heart and lung bypass after a puff or two. Many, mercifully, are overblown. The nail-polish chemical, acetone, naturally occurs in the body in low levels and has only been found in trace amounts. Bush notes that the unfortunate teen who required a bypass suffered an allergic reaction.
A Freedom of Information request I submitted to NHS England showed there were 49 hospital admissions of people under the age of 20 last year with vaping-related disorders, more than double the year before. For all age groups, there were 460 admissions last year, up from 292 in 2021. While the NHS stresses that these figures are provisional, they are concerning. Still, they remain dwarfed by the half a million smokers the NHS treats annually.
Industry critics, like Johnson, the Conservative MP who sat on the select committee inquiry this year, focus on concerns about nicotine use. She has claimed that vaping leads to a shorter attention span. “I know a headteacher who has children who can’t get through a double maths lesson because they can’t concentrate for long enough,” Johnson tells me. “They’re addicted to these things.”
Johnson first became aware of the proliferation of disposable vapes when most of us did, about two years ago, around the time the multicoloured sticks began littering pavements and filling public bins. Vapes have been the cause of more than 700 fires in bin lorries and dumping sites, according to research by Material Focus, as the batteries can become flammable when crushed. It is only recently, Scott Butler of the environmental non-profit tells me, that there have even been recycling points for vapes, with some supermarkets just now beginning to roll them out. “For two years, there was no infrastructure, despite the legislation being very clear that there should have been.”
Johnson is concerned about all of this, but mostly she is worried about children: “People are becoming addicted to vaping instead of smoking. And the take-up from young people is worrying because they’re not smokers.” She presented a bill to parliament in February that would see single-use vapes banned. At the June select committee inquiry, MPs, including Johnson, spoke to teachers and doctors about the rise in youth vaping and grilled representatives of the vaping industry.
I attended that inquiry and, in the corridor outside, I spotted Dunne. He had just got back, he told me, from another vape expo in Dubai. To the committee, Dunne made his case in earnest. He wanted fines increased to £10,000 for unscrupulous sellers, he said. He wanted vapes to be licensed, so hairdressers would stop selling them, and for social media adverts to be looked into. He suggested prison sentences for those selling to children. He accepted, he said, that there was a problem. “So . . . you are calling for tougher regulation of yourself?” asked the slightly baffled chair, MP Steve Brine. “Absolutely,” said Dunne.
When it came to questions of banning colours, flavours or disposable devices entirely, Dunne was more circumspect. He did allow the price point could go up — if the 2ml e-liquid limit was abolished. “Products should be allowed to go up to the region of 10ml,” he said. That would mean a single disposable would contain the equivalent nicotine of 10 packs of cigarettes and, he argued, take 80 per cent of current vapes off the market.
Even at the expo, traders had fretted about the damage being done by the rise of disposables. “They’re the cancer of our industry,” Carus of Black Rose Elixirs told me. “I hope we move away from them, and this is me selling them,” added Saltica’s Altay.
On a couple of stands, however, the sales reps were already eyeing up a new demographic of vaper, a hitherto untapped market: the silver vaper. A higher-end disposable, in other words. A Chinese company called BKS Tradeline was showcasing a vape pipe elegantly finished in wood. The rep told me the company was “moving away from generic disposable products. It’s a bit more of a high-cost product for a discerning market.” The product was a pod-pipe with a mouthpiece containing the e-liquid. Flavours included Tobacco, Passion Fruit Lemon and Green Tea.
Later I noticed a stand showcasing vape cigars, from a company called XO Havana. They were finished in brown cardboard, for an authentic cigar look and feel, and came in cigar flavours, with a twist — cigar leaves flavoured with coffee, almonds or vanilla. As the French owner, Olivier Girard, put it to me: “When you have a glass of wine you don’t want to smoke watermelon.” He added: “We don’t want to attract kids. We’re really worried the vape industry will be banned.”
But don’t cigar smokers often not inhale, I asked? Wouldn’t they be creating nicotine vapers who’d previously not inhaled nicotine? “It’s actually very good,” he replied. “Earlier I had a man that smoked cigars and he said, ‘Oh, wow, now I can inhale!’”
It was, he said, to be a disposable e-cigar.
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