this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Hm okay. I've often thought if I'm gonna keep vaping I should invest in a rig with juice and stuff, much more economical and less wasteful (not to mention it won't kill me).
I scanned through various reporting for the same question. They tested 3 brands of cheap disposable vape (article cites there being something like 100 brands of disposable vape on the market). Pretty sure these are all-in-one units; I don't even think they have pod cartridges—so you use it and throw the whole thing out, batteries and hardware included. So they would have incentive to be the cheapest components possible and to cut corners. There’s a line in one of the articles that said something like they have worse chemicals than cigarettes which are worse than refillable vapes, suggesting these are bad, cigarettes bad, refillable less bad to some undefined degree. While they mention the vape liquid as a cause a little bit, a lot of the bad stuff seems to be coming off the hardware with heat—so like leaded wires and atomizers with bad metals on or near them.
All that to say that as per usual reporting tries to lump all vaping into this one mysterious bad category (thinking here about how that stuff with off-market internet THC vapes was used to support headlines like “vaping destroying lungs of zoomers overnight”). I doubt vaping is safe, but even so I would prefer clear and transparent info about it, and often it seems like there’s just a policy decision/agenda-driven bent to a lot of the reporting.
My guess is that if you get a larger system with better quality parts, it’s going to be safer generally than smaller/and more disposable oriented stuff.
I'm a former smoker, vaping for the last ten years on rebuildable tanks with box mods. I had been smoking cigarettes for about ten years before I made the switch. Anecdotally, I can say that my vapes feel way way way less harmful than cigarettes.
I will not touch a disposable vape, and I think they are absolutely a harmful product. This study shows that it's harmful for your body, but I didn't need to know this problem in order to identify that casually throwing away a device with a battery in it is a big no-no. Disposable vapes are incredibly wasteful products.
This might not have any connection to the actually safety though, it could be the tobacco smoke is harsher on the lungs so you feel it but the vape could contain more heavy metals that your lungs/throat don't detect.
But I think you're right, from what I've heard the higher quality vapes don't have the issue with leaching metals from the heating element.
That's true. Still, I feel just fine after all these years, and my lung capacity is way better than it used to be when I smoked cigs. That's not to say that it's perfectly safe, absolutely nobody should ever start vaping unless it's for harm reduction.
Also ngl I still kinda think the actual cause for that was the coronavirus spreading in the United States months before it was discovered
Thanks for the breakdown.
I can also confirm this. You can get part kits and make your own rig as well if you're decent with soldering and have some know-how. Otherwise, lots of decent mods out there.
If disposable vapes are made of recycled plastic then that’s another red flag. Recycled plastic is often of dubious origin. Lots of random dangerous waste gets mixed in with the plastic, such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and of course heavy metals.