Parliament Figures Out How to Sell Wind in Bottles: E-cigarette Deposit as New Business Idea
While in Liepāja near Karosta shops you can find Soviet-era scrap metal, Parliament has decided that now you'll also be able to return e-cigarettes for money.
While Riga is still figuring out how to get people to return bottles instead of throwing them in the Daugava River, a Parliamentary committee has discovered a new business niche — e-cigarette deposits. A bill has been supported in first reading that will finally allow smokers to profit from their harmful habits.
The Cabinet of Ministers explains that 15 million e-cigarettes are discarded annually in Latvia, of which only 5% end up in the right place. The remaining 14.25 million wander around landfills like homeless people, creating explosion hazards and chemical pollution. As one Liepāja resident said: "We already had the Tsar's naval base in Karosta with mythical basements — we could store all these e-cigarettes there, but there probably wouldn't be enough space even there."
The bill stipulates that consumers will have to pay a deposit fee, but can later recover it in cashless form. This means smoking will become an investment — buy an e-cigarette, use it, bring it back and get money. Almost like with bottles, only much more expensive and with a higher chance of catching fire.
Industry representatives warn that applying the deposit system to reusable e-cigarettes would be inefficient, but the ministry promises to fix this "technical imprecision." Perhaps we'll soon see deposits on old phones and worn-out sock pairs too — after all, they also have batteries.
⚠️ Satirical article. Facts are preserved, but the presentation is humorous. For accurate information, please refer to the original source.