Waste management firm GAP Group aims to increase vape recycling

A waste management business in the North East has launched a service that can recycle up to 200,000 vapes a week.

The offering from Gateshead’s GAP Group comes after figures suggested 1.3m disposable vapes are being thrown away and not recycled each week, leading to the loss of valuable materials in their lithium batteries, as well as increasing the amount of rubbish going to landfill.

GAP Group has launched a collection service which works with retailers that give customers a place to bring back vapes at the end of their use. A new facility at the company’s site on Nest Road then recycles the devices.

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Managing director Peter Moody said: “With over 67.6m vapes thrown away each year, GAP can now facilitate the collection and transport of vapes from retailers to our recycling facilities to extract the valuable materials such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese inside. The items might be called ‘disposable’ but they can and should be recycled as the lithium alone in these items, if recycled correctly, provides enough metal to make batteries for 1,200 electric cars.”

Nathan Lowrey, operations manager at GAP Group (NE) Limited, said: “We have created 1,300sqft space and dedicated a team of 10 staff working 10 hour shifts and we’ve introduced an automatic press to assist with the laborious process. We have capacity to process 200,000 vapes a week but currently we’re only operating at about 20% capacity as so many of these vapes are being lost through unsafe disposal.”

GAP Group, which was founded in 2005, employs 120 people around the North East and operates one of Europe’s largest waste electrical and electronic equipment processing plants recycling upwards of 750,000 fridges annually. It also recently invested in a 50,000sqft polymer and metal separation unit that will safely separate the plastic components of electronic goods.