A look at the waste materials vaping leaves behind

In her office at the high school in Boulder, Colorado, the assistant principal has a large cardboard box where she can toss the spoils of her ongoing battle with the newest student addiction.

“This is what I call the box of death,” said Kristen Lewis. “This is everything that we’ve confiscated.”

The box is filled with vape pens like Juuls, the leading brand of e-cigarettes, dozens of disposable pods for nicotine liquid, and even a lonely box of Marlboros.

At Boulder High, students are prohibited from smoking cigarettes or vaping electronic cigarettes anywhere on school grounds. But Lewis and other school employees still regularly pluck e-cigarettes from students’ hands or find the used pods scattered all around.

In the school parking lot, Lewis spotted some discarded packaging and picked it up: “This one is an Orion vape device, it looks like.” A little further on, she spotted a pile of vaping waste: “Yep, more Juul pods.”

She finds them even farther out: along the edge of nearby Boulder Creek, and in the yards of homes across from the school.

The extent of the trash reveals “how much this has become a part of our students’ lives,” Lewis said. “And that’s what’s scary. ... It really has become an epidemic in our schools, and not just here at Boulder High, but every high school in the nation is really dealing with this.”

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Colorado topped the list for teen vaping in 2018, and Boulder is one of the hot spots. The surge in vaping has led to health problems, including an outbreak of very serious and sometimes fatal lung disease. Vaping also has created a less discussed new environmental problem in discarded pens and the abundant pods that come with them.

The disposable pod is a small plastic cartridge that holds the nicotine liquid. It snaps onto the base smoking device, often called a “vape pen,” which can look like an actual pen or an innocuous digital accessory such as a flash drive. In 2017, people bought more than 16 million of the devices in the U.S., a figure that doesn’t include the disposable pods, which in the case of Juul are often sold in packs of four.

Where old cartridges and sleek battery-laden devices go after they’re used is becoming a huge problem for waste managers.

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Clovis landfill Superintendent Oscar Macias said large amounts of e-cigarettes and empty vaping containers could fall under the category of electronic waste and hazardous materials, but he said the local landfill doesn’t have any special method for disposing of them.

In small amounts, however, Macias said it is fine for residents to throw spent vaping supplies away with regular garbage; it won’t make a difference given the tonnage of trash the landfill processes, he said.

“As for recycling, sometimes we just really don’t have the means to do that kind of thing locally,” Macias said.

Macias added that e-cigarettes could potentially be recycled with similar electronic waste items, but Curtis Smith of Ed's Recycling and Maria Chavarria of Clovis Recycling said neither of the facilities take vaping supplies of any sort.

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In Boulder, the community is responding to the onslaught of waste. Boulder’s schools and its health and waste management departments teamed up to create a website about e-cigarettes and vaping that includes information on safe disposal. In November, Boulder voters approved a 40% tax on all electronic smoking devices, including vape pens and the disposable pods.

During a walk around Boulder High, custodian Allen Chavez pointed out where he finds empty Juul pods. Students stuff them between furniture cushions. “Most of these things that we find mostly are in the cracks of these chairs here,” Chavez said.

In a boys’ bathroom, Chavez pointed to a small hole in the wall, where students deposit finished pods.

“I’ve caught a couple of guys,” said Chavez, but students will often say, ‘“It wasn’t me.’”

John Daley of Colorado Public Radio and The News’ Mat Brock contributed to this report.