Over 4,000 disposable e-cigarettes were dropped off at a single Marquette convenience store in the span of one year - a number that, on its face, sounds like a success story. It is, but it also points to something uncomfortable: the sheer volume of single-use vaping devices cycling through even one mid-sized Upper Peninsula community, and the quiet environmental toll they carry when nobody's paying attention. Citizens for a Safe & Clean Lake Superior is now expanding that pilot recycling effort into a four-site collection network across Marquette County, effective December 1.
What Makes a Vape More Than Just Litter
The disposable e-cigarette looks innocuous enough - a slim plastic tube, often brightly colored, cheap and ubiquitous. Under the hood, though, it's a compact hazardous materials package. Every unit contains a lithium-ion battery, residual liquid nicotine concentrate, and various electronic components. Toss one in a trash can and you risk a landfill fire; the thermal runaway behavior of lithium batteries under compression or heat is well documented, and waste facilities have flagged the growing volume of lithium-containing consumer products as a genuine operational hazard. Drop one on the ground and the battery's heavy metals - including compounds like cobalt and manganese - begin leaching into soil and, eventually, surface and groundwater.
Liquid nicotine concentrate, even in small residual amounts, is acutely toxic. It's classified as a hazardous substance precisely because it's absorbed readily through skin contact and is lethal to aquatic organisms at relatively low concentrations. The proximity of Marquette County to Lake Superior - one of the largest freshwater bodies on earth - makes improper disposal here a different kind of problem than it might be elsewhere.
"They are super hazardous," said Jane Fitkin, director of Citizens for a Safe & Clean Lake Superior, speaking of disposable vapes. "They contain a lithium battery, which leaches heavy metals when littered and can cause landfill fires when thrown in the trash. Along with the leftover liquid nicotine concentrate, a hazardous substance, e-cigarettes pose significant environmental impacts when improperly disposed of."
From One Corner Store to a County-Wide Network
For the past year, the organization ran a single drop-off point at Kenny's Corner Store in downtown Marquette. The 4,000-plus returns from that one location gave Fitkin's group enough evidence - and momentum - to build out. Drop-off containers are now placed at Circle K locations along U.S. 41 in Harvey, Marquette, Negaunee, and Ishpeming, spreading the collection footprint along one of the region's main commercial corridors.
The logistics behind the scenes are worth understanding. Collected vapes don't simply get boxed up and hauled off. Volunteers gather at bimonthly "Tape the Vapes" events to consolidate and prepare the devices for recycling - taping exposed battery contacts to prevent short circuits during transport, a standard safety step in battery waste handling. The prepared waste then moves to Recycle 906, which aggregates the material and ships bulk quantities to a dedicated battery recycling center. It's not glamorous work. It is, however, the kind of unglamorous infrastructure that actually keeps hazardous materials out of the watershed.
Cannabis Vapes: The Next Frontier, With Complications
The program is currently limited to nicotine vapes, but Fitkin says cannabis vape collection is the next logical step - and a necessary one. Cannabis vapes pose essentially the same environmental risks as their nicotine counterparts: same lithium battery, same leaching potential, same improper disposal patterns. The difference is regulatory. Cannabis remains a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law, which creates real constraints on where and how cannabis-adjacent products can be collected, even when the intent is environmental remediation rather than consumption.
The Fire Station Cannabis Company, a local dispensary, is sponsoring the organization's work to navigate those regulatory wrinkles and extend the program to cannabis vapes at separate, compliant locations. That's a meaningful partnership - dispensaries have both the consumer access and the institutional interest in responsible product disposal. Whether the regulatory path proves workable in the near term remains to be seen, but Fitkin says both parties are optimistic.
Here's the broader context worth holding onto: the rise of disposable e-cigarettes has created a waste stream that almost no existing municipal recycling infrastructure was designed to handle. These are not products you drop in a curbside bin. They're not covered by most producer responsibility frameworks. And they've proliferated at a pace that outstripped any coordinated disposal response. What's happening in Marquette County - a local non-profit building a recycling chain from collection point to battery processor - is, in practice, communities solving a problem that neither industry nor government has fully reckoned with yet.
