Vaping is a perfect fit for the minimalist lifestyle. Minimalism is all about freeing yourself from mental clutter by removing unnecessary possessions and distractions that take your mind away from more important things, and that’s exactly what vaping does. If you stock up, you can buy several months of vape juice and coils in advance and eliminate daily or weekly trips to the convenience store. Vaping also reduces the number of items that you have to carry everywhere you go, since you can carry a single slim vape instead of a bulky pack of cigarettes and lighter.
Although vaping and minimalism go hand in hand regardless of what your preferred vaping products happen to be, some ways of vaping are definitely more minimalist than others – so if you really want to embrace minimalism as a vaper, it’s worthwhile to consider making a few changes. As you read the suggestions in this article, consider how they might apply to your situation and think about whether they might be good fits for your lifestyle.
Switch from Disposable Vapes to a Refillable Vape
One of the biggest aspects of embracing minimalism as a vaper is reducing the amount of waste that you generate. We’ll talk about a few different ways of doing that in this article, but the biggest thing that you can do by far is make the switch from disposable vapes to a refillable vape. In terms of the amount of waste that you generate, there’s really no contest between the two. When you use disposable vapes, you’re discarding and replacing your device every week or two. A refillable vape, on the other hand, can easily last a year or longer.
Even if you have a local recycling service that takes used disposable vapes, it’s still somewhat wasteful because the typical recovery rate for recycled lithium is only about 70 percent. A lithium-ion battery can last hundreds of charge cycles, so there’s really no reason to buy a device that you’re only going to recharge around a dozen times during its lifespan. Another huge benefit of using a refillable vape is that bottled vape juice is dramatically cheaper than disposable vapes for the amount of e-liquid you get.
Use a Vape with a Low-Waste Design
Everyone knows that vaping devices create technical waste. Switching to a refillable vape is the best way to combat that problem, but it’s also a very good idea to use a vape that’s specifically designed to be environmentally friendly if you care about minimalism.
The most environmentally friendly vapes:
- Have removable batteries rather than ones that are built in. Every battery stops holding a charge eventually. If the battery is removable, you can replace it and continue using your device. Removable batteries are also very easy to recycle.
- Have glass tanks rather than plastic pods. Glass is one of the most recyclable materials, being basically 100-percent recoverable with no loss of quality.
- Have coils that are replaceable rather than built in. It’s wasteful to throw away an entire tank or pod when all it needs is a new coil.
Find a Favorite Flavor and Stick with It
Having a drawer full of half-finished bottles of e-liquid definitely isn’t conducive to a minimalist lifestyle. Neither is spending hours browsing the selection at your favorite online vape shop because you aren’t sure what to buy – so make an effort to find your favorite flavor and stick with it. That way, you can just click the “Reorder” button when it’s time to stock up instead of browsing through endless lists of flavors.
At the same time, though, it’s important to keep in mind that variety and experimentation may help to keep you interested in vaping when you might otherwise have been tempted to return to smoking. If you need to try new flavors once in a while to keep the experience fresh, you should do what you need to do – and that brings us to our next section.
Do What Works for You
Although it can be great to embrace the minimalist lifestyle as a vaper, doing what’s necessary to keep yourself away from tobacco is arguably even more important. So, if you need to do something that doesn’t quite fit the minimalist ethos because you’d be tempted to revert to smoking otherwise, then that’s exactly what you should do – whether it’s buying a new device here and there, trying a new vape tank or even using disposable vapes instead of a refillable vape. Staying away from cigarettes is much more important.
Recycle Your Waste
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, switching from disposable vapes to a refillable vape is easily the biggest thing that you can do if you want to embrace minimalism as a vaper. Disposable vapes are wasteful. They fill your environment with clutter. They also fill your mind with clutter because they only last a few days before you need to replace them – so you’re always thinking about when you’re going to need to buy more and what you’re going to do to dispose of the used ones that are piling up in your junk drawer.
Although switching from disposable vapes to a refillable vape can make a huge difference on its own, you definitely don’t have to stop there if you want to bring your waste down to an absolute minimum. Make an effort to recycle everything that you can.
- E-liquid bottles can be rinsed and recycled with your other plastic waste.
- If you use a vape with a removable battery, you can recycle used batteries by dropping them off at any battery collection point.
- Most components of vape tanks are recyclable. You might have difficulty finding a recycling center that will accept coils. A tank’s enclosure can be recycled with other glass items, though, and the metal components can be recycled with other scrap metal.
- Most e-waste facilities should accept vaping devices as long as they contain no e-liquid.
If you recycle all of the things listed above, used coils should be the only things that ever end up in your regular trash – and that’s about as minimalist as vaping can possibly get.