Guess How Much Lead Is Released By Disposable Vapes

We’ll not bury the lead, so to speak:

❝To place the potential for Pb exposure in the context of traditional cigarettes, Figure 3B compares the mass of Pb in a pack of traditional cigarettes (20 cigarettes) to the mass of Pb of a comparable nicotine dose from the Esco Bar devices (details provided in SI Section S2.4).

In comparison to the highest Pb delivery measured for traditional cigarettes, on average Esco Bar devices (Flavored and Clear) emitted ∼4 to 13 times more Pb (4.9 and 15.4 μg, respectively) in the first 200 puffs than the highest reported for a pack of cigarettes (20 cigarettes; 1.2 μg) (42) (Figure 3B, Table S13.2).

For context, this level of Pb exposure is equivalent to smoking as many as 19 packs of cigarettes in a single day (Table S13.3).❞

Pb = lead, as in the heavy metal of that name

Read in full: Elevated Toxic Element Emissions from Popular Disposable E-Cigarettes: Sources, Life Cycle, and Health Risks

There are several things at hand here:

• This is of course only looking at lead, and not other considerations.
• You can read about some of the other considerations in the paper, by the way; they did look at other toxic elements too; we’re just focusing on lead here
• Vapes (of various kinds) contain many other unpleasantries, and/but so do cigarettes (partially overlapping; each method has its relative strengths and weaknesses)
• This is specifically about disposable vapes, and will not apply to refillable vapes in the same way (because those “first 200 puffs” aren’t being repeated every day with a new device bringing more lead; instead it’s the same device every day, delivering gradually less lead each day)
• That does not, however, mean that refillable vapes are safe or healthy, just that they will be relatively less unsafe and less unhealthy than disposable ones

You may be wondering: why is this only just now coming out?

And the answer is: tobacco companies have a huge amount of influence on what research is (and isn’t) done/published with regard to tobacco

Besides any research/publication bias that may be occurring, there are more reasons too:

• Companies manufacturing these disposable vapes outright lied about what went into their construction (the paper discusses this “illicit use of leaded bronze”
• Unlike a lot of health risks, lead poisoning is cumulative and/but very slow to show ill effects (one of the reasons it took humanity until quite recent times to establish lead’s toxicity; it was hard to isolate the effects of a toxin that acts so very slowly and that everyone was getting from the ubiquity of lead plumbing)
• This problem is much more severe in the latest generation of e-cigarettes (the paper compared and contrasted them to older devices)

For reference, OSHA puts the Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL) for lead exposure in the workplace at 50 micrograms per cubic meter (of air) over 8 hours.

The paper cites finding 175 ppm of lead, which is approximately 1,533,540 micrograms per cubic meter.

Suffice it to say, neither you nor your loved ones should be inhaling a gram and half of lead.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about vaping from our older article about this, which (obviously) doesn’t cover the heavy metal content that’s just been revealed, but examines the other considerations (including pros and cons vs smoking): Vaping: A Lot Of Hot Air?

Take care!