From Disposable to Reusable: What Happened to the UK Vape Market After the Ban?

On 1 June 2025, disposable vapes disappeared from legal retail shelves across the UK.

For retailers, manufacturers and consumers, the change was immediate. A product category that had become almost impossible to ignore was suddenly no longer allowed to be sold in its traditional single-use form.

For years, disposable devices had occupied a very particular position in the vaping market. They were simple. Portable. Familiar. In many cases, they required almost no setup at all.

There was no bottle to carry. No tank to fill. No coil to replace. For someone who did not want to learn the technical side of vaping, that simplicity was part of the appeal.

Then the rules changed.

But banning a product category does not automatically answer the more interesting question: what happens to the people who were using it?

One year after the UK ban, some answers are becoming clearer. The available data shows a sharp decline in the reported use of disposable vapes among both adults and young people.

That part is relatively straightforward.

What is much harder to see is the full journey that followed.

The wider UK vaping market did not simply disappear when disposable products were removed from legal retail shelves. People still vape. Products are still being sold. Manufacturers are still designing devices around portability, convenience and ease of use.

However, there is an important distinction between what the data does show and what it does not show.

We can clearly see that disposable vape use has fallen. What is less certain is whether all former disposable users have moved to the same type of reusable product—or whether they have followed completely different paths.

This article looks at what the available data tells us one year after the UK banned single-use vapes, what we can reasonably conclude from those numbers, and what questions are still waiting to be answered.

Why Did the UK Ban Disposable Vapes?

The UK’s ban on single-use vapes officially came into force on 1 June 2025.

According to the UK Government, the policy was introduced partly in response to concerns about environmental waste and the growing visibility of disposable vapes among young people.

The ban applies to the sale and supply of single-use vapes, whether they contain nicotine or not.

That last point is worth noting because the policy is focused on the product format, rather than simply on nicotine content.

In other words, the UK did not introduce a general ban on vaping products.

Reusable products can still legally be sold.

This distinction is important because it changes the way the market should be understood. The policy was not designed to remove every vape from circulation. Instead, it removed one particular format: products intended to be used and then discarded rather than recharged and reused.

That may sound like a technical difference, but for consumers it can mean a very different experience.

A person moving from a traditional disposable vape may now need to think about charging. They may need to replace a pod or cartridge. Depending on the product, they may also need to understand compatibility or refilling.

For experienced vapers, none of this may seem particularly complicated.

For someone who chose disposables specifically because they did not want to think about any of those things, it can be a meaningful change.

According to official GOV.UK guidance, a vape is considered reusable when it meets the required conditions for reuse, including having a rechargeable battery and a refillable container for e-liquid.

That container may take different forms, such as a chamber, capsule, cartridge, pod or tank.

The result is a post-ban market that still contains vaping products, but has to deliver convenience through different product designs.

It became a market where manufacturers and consumers had to operate without the traditional single-use format.

And once that format disappeared from legal retail, the next question became unavoidable: would consumer behaviour disappear with it, or would it simply move somewhere else?

What Changed After the Ban?

The clearest change is also the easiest one to measure:

Far fewer vapers now say that disposable products are their main device.

That does not necessarily tell us everything about the market. But it does tell us that the ban coincided with a substantial change in reported product use.

Data published by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), based on YouGov survey research commissioned by ASH, showed a substantial decline in disposable vape use during the first year of the ban.

Among adults who vape, the proportion mainly using disposable products fell from 24% in 2025 to 8% in 2026.

Among 11–17-year-olds who vape, the proportion fell from 42% to 13% over the same period.

Those numbers matter not only because they are lower. They also show how quickly the reported device mix can change when a major product category is removed from legal sale.

In both groups, disposables went from representing a significant share of main device use to a much smaller one.

The decline is even more striking when compared with earlier years.

ASH reported that disposable products had previously reached a peak of 31% among adult vapers in 2023 and 69% among young vapers aged 11–17.

That earlier growth helps explain why the ban attracted so much attention in the first place. Disposable devices were not an obscure corner of the market. At their peak, they had become a major product format for a large share of users measured in these surveys.

Now, the picture looks very different.

The change did not happen because consumers collectively woke up one morning and suddenly developed the same preference for another type of device. A major regulatory change altered what could legally be sold.

Consumer behaviour then had to adjust around that new reality.

Disposable vapes have gone from being a major device category to a much smaller part of reported vaping behaviour.

That is the clearest conclusion available from the headline data.

The more complicated question is what came next.

The Numbers: Disposable Vape Use One Year Later

The figures below provide a simple snapshot of how dramatically reported main-device use changed between 2025 and 2026.

The table is not intended to explain every individual consumer decision. It does something narrower, but still important: it shows the scale of the decline in disposable vape use among the groups measured by ASH.

User Group	Mainly Used Disposable Vapes Before the Ban	Mainly Used Disposable Vapes One Year Later
Adult vapers	24% in 2025	8% in 2026
Vapers aged 11–17	42% in 2025	13% in 2026

Source: Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), 2026. Survey data collected by YouGov and commissioned by ASH.

Viewed side by side, the pattern is difficult to miss.

Among adult vapers, the reported share mainly using disposables fell from roughly one in four to fewer than one in ten, and the 11–17 group measured in the survey, the fall was similarly substantial, moving from 42% to 13%. But this is where the table reaches the edge of what it can tell us.

It shows fewer people reporting disposable products as their main device. It does not provide a complete map of where every former disposable user went.

Some may have switched to reusable products because they wanted to continue vaping. Others may have experimented with a different product format and found that they preferred it. Some may have reduced their use or stopped altogether.

And there may also be users whose purchasing behaviour changed in ways that are difficult to capture through a single question about their main device.

That is why a falling percentage should not automatically be translated into a simple one-line story.

The data clearly measures the decline of disposable vape use. It does not prove that every former user has followed the same path.

The distinction may seem cautious, but it is important. A market can change dramatically while the individual routes through that change remain highly varied.

The Bigger Picture: Vaping in Great Britain

To understand the impact of the disposable vape ban, it also helps to zoom out.

The question is not only how many people stopped using disposables. It is also important to understand the scale of vaping in Great Britain before the ban took effect.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), around 5.4 million people aged 16 and over in Great Britain reported using an e-cigarette daily or occasionally in 2024.

That represented approximately 10% of the population covered by the survey.

For comparison, the same ONS release reported approximately 4.9 million current cigarette smokers under the survey measure used for Great Britain.

This was the first time the number of reported current e-cigarette users exceeded the number of reported current cigarette smokers in that dataset.

The ONS also reported that daily e-cigarette use increased from 5.9% in 2023 to 6.7% in 2024, while occasional use fell from 3.9% to 3.3%.

These figures do not tell us how every person uses a vape, what device they prefer or why they choose it.

They do, however, show that vaping had already become a significant part of the UK’s nicotine landscape before the single-use ban came into force. This matters because the ban therefore affected a large and diverse group of consumers.

There is no single “vape user”.

Some people vape every day. Some use a device occasionally. Some may care about customisation, flavour choice or battery life. Others may simply want a product that works with as little maintenance as possible.

That diversity makes the post-ban transition more complicated than simply replacing one product with another.

By the time the disposable vape ban came into force, vaping was already a significant part of the UK’s nicotine landscape.

The policy therefore changed the environment around an existing consumer behaviour. It did not create that behaviour from scratch, and removing one format did not automatically remove the reasons different people had for vaping in the first place.

What Counts as a Reusable Vape?

One of the biggest sources of confusion after the ban has been the word reusable.

At first glance, it sounds simple.

If a device can be charged again, surely it is reusable?

Not necessarily.

Under the UK’s rules, the definition is more specific.

According to the UK Government’s guidance, a reusable vape must have a rechargeable battery and a refillable e-liquid container.

The container can include:

• A pod
• A cartridge
• A capsule
• A chamber
• A tank

This definition is more important than it might initially appear.

Consumers often think about products in terms of convenience: “Can I use it again?” “Do I have to refill it?” “What happens when the e-liquid runs out?” Regulation, however, has to define product categories more precisely. That is why simply adding a charging port does not automatically turn a product into a reusable device under the relevant rules.

The definition also shows how broad the reusable category can be.

A reusable product does not have to look like a traditional refillable tank system. Depending on its design, reuse can involve replacing a pod, cartridge or other container rather than manually pouring e-liquid into a device.

The post-ban market is therefore no longer divided simply into two categories:

Disposable vs. complicated.

There are now multiple legal product formats that can offer different balances between convenience, maintenance and user control.

For example, some users may prefer a refillable pod system because they want to choose their own e-liquid. Others may prefer a replaceable cartridge because they want a simpler experience without carrying a bottle of e-liquid. More experienced users may continue using tanks or other advanced systems because they value customisation and familiarity. Those choices are different. The underlying goal may not be.

For many consumers, the question remains simple: how much effort do I need to put into using this product?

The ban removed one format, but it did not create one universal replacement.

What the Current Data Does Not Tell Us

This is where the conversation becomes more interesting. The available survey data clearly shows that disposable vape use has fallen sharply. That conclusion is supported by the numbers. But the decline itself is only one part of the story.

Imagine following thousands of individual users through the ban.

One person may have bought a refillable pod system. Another may have chosen a device with replaceable cartridges. Someone else may have stopped vaping entirely. Another person may have changed their nicotine use in a way that does not fit neatly into a single product category.

When those individual journeys are compressed into a headline statistic, much of that detail disappears. That is not a weakness in the survey. It simply means that different questions require different types of data.

The currently available headline figures cannot fully answer questions such as:

• How many former disposable users switched specifically to refillable pod systems? / moved to prefilled or replaceable cartridge products? / stopped vaping? / switched to another nicotine product?
• How much of the market shift reflects consumer preference, and how much simply reflects the removal of disposable products from legal retail?

Those are product-level and behavioural questions. Answering them properly would require more detailed long-term data that follows how consumers adapt over time.

This distinction matters because it is tempting to create a very simple narrative:

Disposable vapes were banned, therefore everyone switched to reusable vapes.

It sounds logical.

But the current evidence does not support such a universal conclusion.

A more accurate interpretation is narrower, and arguably more useful.

The ban has successfully coincided with a major reduction in reported disposable vape use. Meanwhile, the wider vaping market continues to adapt around the available product formats.

Exactly how that adaptation is distributed between refillable systems, replaceable cartridges, other nicotine products or reduced use is still a more complicated question.

The transition is visible. The final destination is still developing.




Why Convenience Still Matters




The disposable vape boom was never only about disposability.

It was also about convenience.

That distinction may be one of the most important ways to understand what happens next.

Traditional vaping systems can require users to understand a surprising number of things:

• E-liquid bottles
• Nicotine strength
• Coil resistance
• Wattage
• Charging
• Refilling
• Maintenance

For an experienced user, that knowledge can be part of the appeal. More control. More options. More ability to adjust the device to personal preferences. But for someone who simply wants a straightforward product, every additional decision creates friction.

A disposable device removed most of those decisions.

Open the package, after that use the device and replace it when it was finished.

That experience set a very high standard for simplicity. And although the single-use format has now been removed from legal retail, the desire for simplicity has not necessarily disappeared with it.

This creates one of the central challenges for reusable products.They do not simply need to comply with new regulations. They also need to make reuse feel manageable for people who may previously have avoided more complicated systems.

That could mean easier charging. Clearer battery information. Straightforward compatibility. Replaceable pods or cartridges. Less mess. Fewer steps. Designs that make it obvious what the user is supposed to do next.

In that sense, the future of reusable vaping products may not be about convincing every consumer to become more interested in vaping technology. It may be about hiding more of that complexity behind better product design.

The most successful reusable products may therefore be the ones that make reuse feel less like maintenance and more like a natural continuation of the same simple experience. That question may become increasingly important as the market continues to adjust.




What Could Happen Next?




One year after the ban, the direction of travel is already visible: disposable vape use has fallen sharply. What happens next is less certain.

The market is now moving beyond the simplest question of whether the ban changed behaviour. It clearly did. The next question is what kind of behaviour becomes stable over time.

Future surveys and market data may reveal whether consumers increasingly settle around a few dominant reusable formats or whether the market becomes more fragmented, with different groups choosing different solutions.

Several trends are worth watching.

First, regulators and researchers will continue to monitor how vaping behaviour changes over time.

The first year after a major regulatory change may look very different from the third or fifth. Some consumers may initially choose whatever product feels most familiar, then gradually change their preferences as they become more comfortable with reusable formats.

Second, manufacturers will continue developing products that attempt to balance convenience with reusability.

This may be less about creating the most technically advanced device and more about reducing friction. A product can contain more technology without asking the user to think about more technology.

Third, consumer expectations may also change.

Someone who previously expected to buy a completely new device every few days or weeks may gradually become more familiar with charging, refilling or replacing a pod.

But behavioural change is rarely immediate.

The disappearance of one product does not automatically change the reasons people chose it. People may still want: Portability, simple operation, minimal maintenance, consistent performance and easy replacement. Those needs existed before the ban, and there is no reason to assume they suddenly disappeared afterwards. The difference is that manufacturers now have to meet those expectations within a different regulatory framework. That may encourage more experimentation with product design. It may also create clearer distinctions between products aimed at users who want full control and products aimed at users who simply want something straightforward. The companies that understand those needs may have the strongest opportunity in a post-disposable market.

Not because every consumer will want the same device.

But because the underlying problem—how to make a reusable product feel convenient—still has to be solved in multiple ways.




Conclusion: The Product Changed, but the Consumer Need Remains




One year after the UK banned single-use vapes, the most obvious result is clear.

Disposable vape use has fallen dramatically.

ASH survey data shows that the proportion of adult vapers mainly using disposable products fell from 24% to 8%, while the figure among vapers aged 11–17 fell from 42% to 13%. That is a significant change in a relatively short period of time.

At the same time, official ONS data shows that vaping was already a major part of the nicotine landscape in Great Britain before the ban took effect, with approximately 5.4 million people reporting current e-cigarette use in 2024. So the story was never simply about removing a product from shelves.

It was about changing one part of a much larger market.

What the available evidence does not yet show is a single, universal replacement path.

Not every former disposable user will choose the same product. The demand for simple, portable and easy-to-use products did not necessarily disappear when single-use vapes left legal retail shelves.

What changed was the format manufacturers are allowed to use to meet that demand, and that creates a different challenge.

Can a reusable product remain simple enough for people who previously chose disposables precisely because they did not want to refill, adjust, maintain or learn about their device?

The data can already tell us that the old product category has become much less important.

It cannot yet give us a complete answer about what the new long-term market will look like.

The transition is real. The outcome is still unfolding.




Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available information and data from the UK Government, the Office for National Statistics and Action on Smoking and Health, available at the time of writing. Survey results, regulations and consumer behaviour may change over time. This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute medical, scientific, legal or regulatory advice. Readers should refer to the original sources and relevant authorities for the most current information.