Sharon Keogan: Vape ban could increase lithium battery fires

And Minister, you're very welcome into the chamber this evening and I rise to speak on the Public Health Single-Use Vapes Bill 2025. At the outside, let me be clear, the objective of this bill is sound and it is broadly shared across this house. Disposable vapes are wasteful, environmentally damaging and far too accessible to children and young people. The decision to remove them from the market is justified and overdue. However, as legislators, our responsibility does not end with good intentions. It begins with asking whether the measures we put in place will actually deliver the outcomes we seek or whether, through gaps in design, they may create new problems while failing to solve the old ones. And I think it's fair to say that this bill before us is not one that turns on the deep moral question or contested legal principles but to rather a piece of technical public policy legislation aimed at achieving a clear and practical objective and we should interrogate it as is such. That is why correspondence I received recently from the Irish Waste Management Association, which I understand many other senators also receive, deserves careful attention because what it outlines is deeply concerning. While the IWMA fully supports the purpose of this bill, what they question is whether the current wording risks repeating the mistakes seen in other jurisdictions, particularly in the UK, where bans on single-use vapes were followed not by reduced harm or reduced waste but by a shift in the market towards so-called multi-use devices. These devices we are told contain significant larger lithium batteries, hold far more liquid and are often only marginally more expensive than disposable vapes. In practice they become semi-disposable products, heavier, more dangerous in the waste stream and far more likely to cause fires in bin lorries and recycling facilities. This is not a theoretical concern. Ireland's waste sector has experienced repeated devastating fires in recent years and the reading is really quite shocking. Over the last five years, at least eight major Irish waste and recycling facilities have suffered catastrophic fires, many linked to lithium battery incidents, resulting in closures, rebuilds and severe capacity loss. Out of nine facilities sorting household dry recyclables, three of them are currently out of action due to fires, mainly one more facilities sorting household dry recyclables. Three of them are currently out of action due to fires, mainly one more fire could tank our national capacity for recycling. And this is unsurprising for anyone aware of the nature of lithium battery fires. These fires reach temperatures up to 1400 degrees centigrade. These release toxic gases are incredibly difficult to extinguish and can reignite even after being extinguished. So to this end, banning single-use vapes is a laudable and necessary measure, as it is a simple insanity that they should be so easily bought and then so easily thrown away into ordinary bins. However, if this bill inadvertently accelerates the movement towards larger sealed battery devices, then we will have succeeded in banning one product category while worsening the underlying environmental and safety risk. That would represent a failure of policy design, not because of the aim was wrong, but because the system effects were not fully thought through. So I will not be asking to block or abandon this bill, but ask quite reasonably for space and time to get the details right. I would like to ask whether the definition of reusable is robust enough to prevent manufacturers gaming the system, whether battery size, design and disposability should be addressed directly, and ask whether producers responsible for end of life disposable should be made explicit rather than assumed. These are precisely the sort of questions that committee stage exist to answer. So to this end, I will be looking to bring forward amendments that will attempt to address these issues, and I'd like to invite the government and all members of the chamber who are interested in contacting me to collaborate in making these amendments. For example, we could look at measures that distinguish genuine reusable products from quasi-disposables that take account of lithium battery fire risk and restrict certain battery sizes. And we can also look at measures that mandate producers responsibility for damages done to waste systems and perhaps even strengthening the existing penalties on those who throw these vapes into the wrong bins. None of this delays the Bill. It simply ensures that we are not back here in two years' time legislating to fix a problem we could have anticipated today. So thank you, Minister.