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Local Voices

Island Vape Shop Celebrates Earth Day…Switch to E-Cigarettes!

Local Clearwater smokers are turning in their packs of tobacco cigarettes for a safer alternative electronic cigarette.

It’s important that we point out how beneficial e-cigarette companies are to the environment, when compared to both the tobacco and electronics industries.

Well, Earth Day is an annual event that helps increase awareness for pollution, climate change, and other environmental disasters that have befallen our planet as a result of a whole range of human endeavors. Celebrated this year on April 22 with the theme “The Face of Climate Change”, Earth Day also aims to change attitudes and find solutions.

Speaking of which, switching to electronic cigarettes may well be one of those solutions. It certainly speaks volumes about your environmental consciousness: As a Electronic Cigarette smoker, you DON’T GIVE UP on the pleasures of smoking – the rich, full-bodied taste, the exceptionally high smoke volume, the sheer sensation of taking a drag and blowing out that flavorful vapor (just like a cigarette) all without the not-so-clean-and-green aspects of traditional cigarettes – ash, butts, and other cigarette debris.

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Island Vape Shop on Clearwater beach sells the environmentally-friendlier alternative. No ifs, ands, or butts!

Some sobering facts: Did you know, there are now over one billion (and growing) smokers in the world? China’s 300 million smokers alone consume about 1.7 trillion cigarettes a year. Small wonder that millions of cigarette butts are tossed to the ground every day. In fact, some statistics show that they are now the most common type of litter on earth. No surprise there – cigarette butts take very long to decompose and they cannot be recycled.

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But it does not end there. Wind and rain inevitably carry these butts into rivers, lakes, and oceans, negatively affecting their fish and animal inhabitants. Or else, the butts are left on the ground – destroying beautiful plant life.

Electronic cigs don’t burn – there’s no traditional cigarette waste to mess up the environment!

You don’t have to light an electronic cigarette (unlike regular tobacco cigarettes) to start enjoying an unmatched smoking experience. If you’re a e-cig user, you only have to screw together the long-lasting battery and the cartomizer (a cartridge filled with vaping liquid with a built-in heating element called an atomizer). Inhale it just like you would a regular cigarette – and the battery activates the atomizer, turning the liquid into flavorful vapor.

What does it mean to the environment? Simply this: Because nothing burns, there won’t be any traditional cigarette waste or debris – butts, filters, ash, disposable lighters – to litter and pollute streets, parks, beaches, oceans, and landfills. And no cigarette smoke to befoul crowded places, indoor locations, and your immediate environs.

Folks, we have only one earth…help us to take good care of it. On Earth Day and every day.

Long-Term Environmental Benefits of E-Cigs

According to environment watchdog Earth911.com, cigarette butts make up 38% of the litter worldwide, making it the single-most prominent type of litter in the world. Based on Earth911 estimates of 5.5 trillion tobacco cigarettes being produced every year, 38% equals a tremendous amount of annual waste.

The U.S. alone spends an estimated $11.5 billion per year in litter cleanup. But, considering nearly 2 billion pounds of cigarette butts are discarded each year, there’s no way these cleanup efforts can handle such a surplus of waste.

Where does this cigarette waste end up? Thanks to the sheer amount of butts flushed or blown into rivers, most waste now resides in our water supply. This excess exposure to water breaks down the remaining cigarette, releasing chemicals from the tobacco and the filter, potentially harming both aquatic life and our drinking water.

In contrast, e-cigarettes can be recycled, and have lifespans of up to 500 charge cycles, meaning the use of one e-cig could eliminate more than 18 months’ worth of cigarette butts, based on average use. Since most e-cig users carry multiple spare batteries, this number skews even further in favor of electronic smoking devices.

(Not to mention, most people don’t toss their e-cigs out a moving car window, or into a sewer drain when they’re done. Even if users don’t recycle batteries, they typically end up in a junk drawer or on a shelf, far away from harming the environment.)

Similarly, smokers produce an estimated 84,878 tons of air pollution every year, according to Freakonomics.com – roughly half the amount of pollution created by all U.S. automobiles.

This cigarette pollution contains elements of the poisonous compounds we all know cigarettes to contain, including ammonia, acetone, formaldehyde, tar and more.

E-cigarette vapor, on the other hand, contains water, nicotine gas, and vaporized propylene glycol – an organic compound comprised mostly of carbon. Additionally, many e-liquids (including ours) contain vegetable-based glycerin — hardly a noxious substance.

On the surface, smoking vapor from an electronic battery doesn’t seem like the most natural thing in the world. But, when you consider the sheer amount of harmful waste that comes from traditional cigarettes, the use of e-cigs seems downright green. And we’re proud of that.

About Island Vape Shop

Owned by Andrew Nawoichik, he started selling E-Cigs in November 2012 as an online retailer. Headquartered on Clearwater Beach, the company boasts an online store and now a brick and mortar location offering a wide range of electronic cigarette hardware, e-liquids and accessories.


More About Vaping

“Vaping” is the act of inhaling vaporized flavored liquids using an atomizer, a battery tube, a lithium ion battery, and a drip tip, all assembled in a hand-held cylinder designed to be similar to the shape of a cigarette.


Liquid flavors, or “juices,” available to be vaporized in customers’ atomizers range from banana nut bread, to menthol, to fruit, to tobacco itself. These juices – combinations of flavorings, water, and the pharmaceutical grade PG/VG base – are pre-mixed for sale for the Island Vape Shop. Some juices (also known as “e-juices” or “e-liquids”) contain nicotine and can help transition a smoker of traditional cigarettes away from the habit. Smokers can choose nicotine amounts from 24 milligrams, to 12 milligrams, and so on down to 0 milligrams as they wean themselves.


The Journal of Public Health Policy, a peer-reviewed medical journal since 1980, stated in a 2011 review that “electronic cigarettes may aid in smoking cessation and are likely to be more effective at this than traditional pharmacotherapy,” according to Wikipedia’s page on vaping.


Recent Study

Drexel University’s School of Public Health published a report last summer concluding that “the exposures from using e-cigarettes fall well below the threshold for concern for compounds with known toxicity.”


This report, written by Igor Burstyn, Ph.D., of Drexel’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, further claims, “There is no serious concern about the contaminants such as volatile organic compounds (formaldehyde, acrolein, etc.) in the liquid or produced by heating.”


The study contradicts previous findings that vaping was not a safer alternative to smoking. Burstyn writes that “the existing literature [on e-cigarettes] tends to overestimate the exposures and exaggerate their implications.”


The full study can be found online at:http://publichealth.drexel.edu/SiteData/docs/ms08/f90349264250e603/ms08.pdf

To contact Andrew Nawoichik for additional information or comments, please call him at 727-754-9751, or email him at islandvapeshop@gmail.com or www.islandvapeshop.com

Island Vape Shop offers a large selection of personal vaporizers, e-Liquids,  and accessories for both the novice and experienced user.  We specialize in educating the beginner on the various electronic cigarette devices and pride ourselves on offering our customers a money-back guarantee.  


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