Your Vape Is Trash, Literally: What to Do With Dead 510s and Disposables in Toronto

A dead cannabis vape is electronic waste with a lithium battery in it, and in Toronto that means it does not belong in your blue bin, your green bin or your garbage. The City of Toronto accepts loose batteries as household hazardous waste free of charge, but its own instruction is explicit: batteries attached to a device will not be accepted. That rule is easy to satisfy with a 510 setup, where the battery is a separate object, and nearly impossible to satisfy with a disposable, where the cell is sealed inside. We looked for a Toronto drop-off that names cannabis vapes specifically and could not confirm one. Here is what we could confirm.

The scale of it

StratCann reported in September 2026 that cannabis vapes in Canada have generated upwards of 3,550 tonnes of waste over four years. Vapes account for roughly 19 percent of legal cannabis retail sales by dollar value nationally, matching the Ontario Cannabis Store's own 2025 figure of 19.0 percent for the province. The fastest growing part is the all-in-one disposable: sales of disposable devices rose roughly 63 percent during 2025, from about $83 million to about $136 million.

Every one of those disposables is a lithium-ion cell discarded with the oil it was built around. That is the waste problem in one sentence, and it is also a fire problem. Waste and recycling facility fires across North America reached a record 448 incidents in 2025, causing an estimated $2.5 billion in damage, with damaged lithium cells a leading cause.

What goes where, and how confident we are

Item Route Confirmed?
510 battery, no cartridge attached Household hazardous waste. Toronto accepts batteries under 5 kg each, free, at Drop-Off Depots, Community Environment Days and by Toxic Taxi pickup Yes, on the City's household hazardous waste page
Empty 510 cartridge, battery removed Mixed-material electronic waste with cannabis residue. Not accepted in the blue bin. In-store collection is the realistic route Partly. The City's e-waste list does not name vape cartridges
Disposable with the battery sealed inside No confirmed municipal route. The City's instruction to remove the battery cannot be followed on a sealed device No
Outer packaging, tins and boxes Cannabis packaging is frequently multi-material and often not accepted curbside. In-store collection where available Partly, varies by material

None of that is a knock on the City. Toronto's electronic waste and household hazardous waste programmes are free, well documented and easy to use. The category simply arrived faster than the waste rules did.

Where the rules are heading

British Columbia has moved first. In October 2025 the province added a category to its Recycling Regulation covering electronic, electrical and battery-containing products, and the government's own list of what falls inside it names vapes and electronic cigarettes directly. Producers of battery-containing products must submit an extended producer responsibility plan by 15 December 2026, with the programme operational by 1 October 2027. Once that lands, a British Columbian will have a funded place to take a dead device, paid for by the companies that sold it.

Quebec already has something similar for vapes specifically. Call2Recycle runs a recycling programme there for battery-powered vaping devices, e-cigarettes and their components, set up to meet producer responsibility obligations under Quebec rules.

Ontario has an established producer responsibility framework for batteries and for information technology, telecommunications and audio-visual equipment, administered by the Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority. Vaping devices are not named in the equipment category, which covers products whose primary purpose is collecting, storing, processing or communicating information. We could not find an Ontario regulation or programme that names vapes, and we would rather say so than point you somewhere that turns you away.

The one Ontario option we can point at

Purple Hills, an Ontario company, runs a collection programme called the Purple Bin, placing bins inside cannabis retail stores. Coverage figures in trade press have ranged from around 600 stores in 2024 to around 1,000 in 2025, and StratCann reported in June 2025 that the programme takes cartridges and all-in-one devices alongside packaging.

Two caveats. Participation is store by store, so a bin in one shop tells you nothing about the shop down the street, and what a given bin accepts can differ. Ask before you make the trip. That is the most useful line in this article: the store you bought a device from is the first place to ask what it takes back.

What to do with a dead device today

  1. Do not put it in any curbside bin. Not recycling, not organics, not garbage. A lithium cell that gets crushed in a collection truck is the exact failure that produces the fire statistics above.
  2. Do not puncture, crush, cut open or burn it, and do not try to prise a cell out of a sealed disposable. Damaged lithium cells can vent and ignite.
  3. Separate what separates. On a 510 setup, unscrew the cartridge from the battery. You now have a battery, which the City will take, and a cartridge, which it will not.
  4. Tape the terminals on loose batteries before storing or transporting them. This is standard practice for lithium cells and prevents short circuits.
  5. Store dead devices somewhere cool, dry and non-flammable until you have somewhere to take them. A metal tin in a cupboard is fine, a drawer full of paper is not.
  6. Take loose batteries to household hazardous waste. Toronto Drop-Off Depots and Community Environment Days accept them free. Toxic Taxi collection requires a minimum of 10 litres or kilograms in total and is booked through 311.
  7. Ask a store about the cartridges and disposables. This is the gap, and in-store collection is currently the only route we can point to in Ontario.

Format is the part you control

There is a straightforward arithmetic difference between the two vape formats, and it is the only lever available to a consumer before the rules catch up. A 510 battery is rechargeable and lasts across many cartridges. When a cartridge is finished, the cartridge is the waste and the battery keeps going. A disposable pairs one battery with one fill of extract and both are discarded together. On roughly one to two grams per device, a year of disposables is a year of batteries in the bin.

Both formats are legal and both are laboratory tested, and this is not an argument that one is better than the other. It is an observation about how much hardware each puts into the waste stream. The hardware differences are set out in 510 cartridges and vapes, explained, and the reasons vapes generate more complaints than any other category are in Edibles draw the fewest complaints of any category.

A note on packaging

Cannabis packaging in Canada is heavy because the rules require child-resistant containers carrying a great deal of mandatory printed information. Some of those rules relaxed in March 2025, and recycling symbols became permissible on wrappers for the first time, which we covered in Why your cannabis package has a window now. Check the package for a recycling marking, and when in doubt use the City's Waste Wizard or call 311.

We are at 811 Dundas St W, and our hours and directions are on the visit page. What is currently on our shelf is in our full range. Buying from a licensed store also means the device came through a tested, tracked supply chain, covered separately in How to tell a legal Toronto cannabis store from an illegal one.

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