North East Lincolnshire shops rapped over illegal vapes

May 24, 2023

Some tanks for sale were found to be four times the legal limit

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Trading Standards officials in North East Lincolnshire has launched a crackdown on shops in the borough selling illegal vapes, the council has revealed.

The team has carried out a series of inspections at a number of small retailers in the borough and found around two-thirds of the stores visited were selling illegal unregistered disposable e-cigarettes. By law, vaping devices should have an internal tank capacity of no more than 2ml, and the level of nicotine contained in the vaping fluid should not exceed 20mg/ml (or 20 per cent).

As with tobacco products, these items are required to display certain health warnings and every such device, and the liquid it contains should be registered with the MHRA (Medicines and Health care products Regulatory Agency) prior to sale.

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The council said that several hundred offending vaping devices were voluntarily surrendered or removed from sale by the stores, who claim to have been mis-sold the products and had bought them under the impression that they could be legally sold.

A spokesperson for North East Lincolnshire Council said: "Whilst none of the products exceeded the maximum nicotine strength, they all had tanks that exceeded the maximum size, in some cases by as much as four times the permitted limit. This issue is not confined to North East Lincolnshire and thousands of such devices have been seized by Trading Standards officers throughout the United Kingdom in recent months.

"The Trading Standards team have liaised with their colleagues for the areas in which those wholesalers operate, to ensure that they are visited, advised, and the distribution of such goods is stopped. Retailers have been reminded of the need to carry out due diligence on the products they are buying for resale, and their responsibilities regarding underage, and proxy sales."

The council added that, if a disposable device offers more than approximately 600 puffs, it will be illegal to offer for sale - many of the offending items were found to offer up to as many as 5,000 puffs.