ASH is just gasping at trivia here over single use vapes
We would, obviously, prefer defiant teenagers to vape their way into coolness rather than smoke. At which point ASH decides that this should be taxed out of existence, this lower damage method of teenage rebellion:
Add £4 to the price of every vape to put off children from buying them, campaigners have said.
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) are calling for an excise tax on disposable vapes to stop children from being able to buy them for less than £5.
The charity said adding £4 to each single-use vape, which currently cost around £4.99, would make them significantly less affordable for children while still less expensive than tobacco.
One of the justifications put forward is:
It argued such a tax would also have an environmental benefit, with discarded single-use vapes equating to 10 tonnes of lithium being thrown away a year.
10 tonnes of lithium is worth perhaps £800,000 these days. In a more rational market - when the planned mines open - perhaps more like £80,000. That’s the input price, not the value as scrap.
10 tonnes of lithium is also a trivial amount. A world class mine might produce anything from 10,000 to 100,000 tonnes. So, the “waste” here is of the order of one thousandth to one ten thousandth of the output of the one mine.
Not that it is wasted of course - humans have had the use of that lithium so what is the waste?
The single use vape market appears to be worth some £750 million a year. At a fiver a piece that’s 150 million units. Oh, and when we run the numbers back the other way each vape contains half a penny’s worth of lithium. At today’s very high valuation that is.
Ten tonnes of lithium - despite the fact that this is becoming one of those little factoids that is doing the rounds - is trivia.
It’s also true that there is that Pigou Tax idea to think about. That there are externalities, not properly contained in market prices and a tax should be used to correct that. But that idea does insist that the tax should - must - be equal to the size of the problem. It’s not in fact true that this is an externality, that ha’penny of lithium is already included in the market price. But imagine it isn’t, the tax should be that half penny. £4 is overdoing it by only 800 times.
People are losing their minds here. This is like trying to judge the overall health of British sport by concentrating on the question of Sheffield Wednesday’s B Team left fullback. Something of interest to perhaps five people - the manager, the two potential fullbacks and their Mums.
As further proof of the insanity:
It comes as major supermarkets have pulled one of the most popular e-cigarettes from shelves after they were found to contain 50 per cent more nicotine than the legal limit.
Watermelon flavour Elf Bar 600s have been removed from shelves in Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, with some chains stopping sale of the whole Elf Bar 600 range.
The move came after an investigation by the Daily Mail found between 3ml and 3.2ml of nicotine liquid in some e-cigarettes, while the legal limit is 2ml.
A spokesman for Elf Bar told the paper that some batches in the UK had been “inadvertently” overfilled.
Note that the claim isn’t that the vapes are too strong - it’s that they’re too good a deal. The naughty, naughty, people have been offering a 3 lb loaf of bread for only the price of a 2lb loaf. Terrors, eh?
There are indeed problems in this world but perhaps we should raise our sights and try to deal with them, not this sort of trivia.
So, who you reckon? Sam Reed or Jaden Brown, maybe Reece James for the A team then?