The Local Government Association (LGA) in the UK has called for the sale and manufacture of disposable e-cigarettes or vapes to be banned on health and environmental grounds. 

The European Union is also considering a similar move, along with limiting the number of flavors.

Earlier this year the UK government launched a 'Swap to Stop' scheme offering vaping starter kits to heavy smokers. The aim is to encourage up to a million smokers to quit cigarettes.

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"I need to stop smoking – I was smoking about 40 cigarettes a day, believe it or not," said Caroline Reid, a heavy smoker who wishes she could quit. "I'm still smoking but a little bit of vaping. This is it, this is the future," Reid said after buying three disposable vapes.

But is vaping safe? Jacob George, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Dundee, says it's safer than smoking tobacco – but the long-term effects are still unknown.

"What we do know at the moment is that in terms of comparative risk, vaping is still less harmful than smoking," George tells CGTN. "The long-term impacts of vaping, we need to figure out." 

According to UK law, cigarettes can no longer be on public display in shops. They're hidden inside cupboards and all packets carry very graphic health warnings, but similar warnings are not seen on vapes.

Instead customers are offered shelves full of mainly single-use disposable vapes which come in dozens of different flavors, such as triple mango, watermelon ice, marshmallow and gummy bear.

Big business

The vaping market has exploded in recent years. Vaping is big business in the UK, with around four and a half million people using vapes, generating around $1.5 billion a year.

But with this myriad of fancy-sounding fruity flavors, the vaping industry stands accused of targeting children, some of whom have never smoked cigarettes.

A recent study by the UK-based Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) found that in the last three years alone, the number of children taking part in so-called experimental vaping has increased by 50 percent. Today, around 20.5 percent of all 11- to 17-year-olds in the UK have tried vaping.

George is keen to see an end to flavored vapes.

"If I were making the rules, I'd say that you should just have nicotine and that is it, no other flavoring for vaping – so vaping is then seen as something to help you get off tobacco cigarettes and to wean you off [so you can] eventually stop vaping," said the professor.

There is also pressure on legislators here to ban the use of single-use, disposable vapes, which critics say are far too readily available in supermarkets and mobile repair shops across the country.

With 140 million disposable vapes sold in the UK each year, they are rapidly becoming a litter problem too and their tiny lithium batteries are difficult to recycle.

For a product designed to ease people off cigarettes, vaping is creating problems of its own.

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