5 minute read
In a small, poorly lit workshop on a regular shophouse-lined street outside the historic center of Lviv, a former Florida teacher named Ben Hoerber is cracking open British vaping devices with a pair of pliers. He extracts the lithium-ion cells from within and quickly tests each one, before soldering fifty together attached to a cheap one-dollar chip. He then seals the lot inside a 3D-printed casing stamped with the Tryzub, the emblem of Ukrainian resistance.
The end result is a 20,000mAh power bank. It costs his project just five dollars to make and would retail in Ukraine for closer to fifty. Soldiers then use these cobbled-together but highly effective power banks in trenches to charge phones, radios, drone batteries, and anti-drone detection systems, the kind of equipment that, in the context of a perilous frontline, influences whether someone goes home or not.
It is objectively a wonderful story, regardless of your political views. But if you squint at it from the correct angle, it is also an awkward story for the British government.
The UK Disposable Ban
In June 2025, the UK outlawed single-use disposable vapes, based on logic that was hard to argue with. With the devices growing in popularity at a staggering rate, landfills and other refuse sites were becoming swamped with discarded batteries. The lithium cells inside were setting fire to garbage trucks, and the colorful packaging was, allegedly, (though highly debatable) luring children into a nicotine habit.
British environmental legislation soon followed, although the disposables did not vanish so much as rebrand, with a new category of vape devices appearing on shelves within weeks. Technically refillable and rechargeable (and therefore circumnavigating the classification of ‘disposable’), new devices were sold pre-filled in the same colors and thrown away at roughly the same rate.
The upshot of this is roughly 6.3 million units a week still going in the garbage, down from 9 million pre-ban, the net result being a 30% reduction in landfill volume, achieved at the cost of considerable legislative effort and the entire small-scale British disposables retail trade.
Meanwhile, the actual category of device that an adult ex-smoker might sensibly buy, namely a proper refillable, paired with a bottle of properly regulated vape juice UK manufacturers have been notifying the MHRA for over a decade, continues to do what it always did, without the moral panic, and without producing the small mountain of e-waste that the disposables industry has bequeathed to the nation.
The Workshop
It is into this mountain that Hoerber has been digging. His organization, Florida Man for Ukraine, has so far shipped roughly six thousand banned British vapes from a kitchen in Northern England to a workbench in Lviv, with a few thousand more on the way. A volunteer handles the UK end, cracking the cases open, extracting the batteries, and passing them to someone who drives humanitarian aid into Ukraine.
The workshop turns out about 80 power banks a month, although Ben expects to reach 120 soon. They are sent forward to Ukrainian units, who occasionally send back photographs of the kit powering drone antenna systems in active combat. He describes receiving these photographs as ‘exciting’, which feels like a very British understatement from a man originally from Florida.
These materials are essentially free, because the British government has spent a year telling its citizens to throw them away. So that’s exactly what they did, and now many of them are on their way to the front lines of a conflict.
Garbage Trucks
There is a predictable category of policy failure in which the end result is so unmistakably absurd that nobody quite knows what to do next. The British disposable ban is rapidly becoming a case study in that exact type of failure.
The devices were banned because they were wasteful and environmentally ruinous. They are now being shipped in their thousands to Ukraine, where volunteers are extracting the perfectly good rechargeable batteries that the manufacturers had soldered into a single-use throwaway shell in the first place.
The waste was never the lithium, it was the design, and banning the category did not address that; it merely relocated the problem from a British landfill to a Ukrainian workshop, where it is now doing some good (depending, of course, on who you side with).
In reality, the adults who were vaping refillable kits with regulated bottled liquid were never the issue. They are not the ones being repurposed into trench-grade power banks, because their devices were not designed to be thrown in a hedge after three days of use. They were designed to be refilled, which is what refillables do.
A Toast, of Sorts
So a small workshop in western Ukraine continues its work. The chips arrive, the batteries are tested, the cases are 3D-printed, the Tryzub is stamped on the lid, and another power bank goes east. Somewhere on a frontline, a soldier charges an anti-drone detector without having to break cover to find a generator.
It is genuinely clever, and the people doing it deserve every coffee, beer, and donation they receive. It is also a not-so-subtle indictment of every Westminster policymaker who voted for the disposables ban without thinking to ask what the cells inside were actually capable of. Some chap from Florida sure figured it out pretty fast, though.
