Key facts
- California’s Senate passed AB 762 30–9 on August 25, 2026, and the Assembly concurred with Senate amendments 47–16 on August 26, 2026, sending the bill to Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk
- AB 762 bans manufacturing and import of single-use, battery-embedded nicotine vapes starting January 1, 2027, and bans their sale and distribution starting January 1, 2028. Disposable cannabis vapes are explicitly excluded from the definition
- Sponsors point to lithium-ion battery fires at waste and recycling facilities, including a 2016 San Mateo County blaze that caused an estimated $8.5 million in damage, plus street and beach litter, as the rationale. Opponents, including the California Fuels & Convenience Alliance, say most fires and litter trace back to disposables that are already illegal to sell
California is one signature away from becoming the first state to ban the sale of disposable, single-use nicotine vapes. AB 762, authored by Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin (D-Thousand Oaks), cleared its final legislative votes this week and is headed to Governor Newsom, who now has to decide whether to sign it into law.`
The bill doesn’t touch vaping itself. It targets one specific hardware category: devices with a sealed-in lithium-ion battery that can’t be recharged or refilled, meant to be thrown away after the e-liquid runs out. Starting January 1, 2027, it would be illegal to manufacture or import these for sale in California; starting January 1, 2028, it would be illegal to sell or distribute them at all. Any vapor device sold after that would need to be both rechargeable and refillable. Retailers caught selling banned devices face escalating fines, up to $2,000 for repeat violations, and possible license action from the state’s tax and licensing authority.`
The bill was also narrowed as it moved through committee: an earlier draft would have covered disposable cannabis vapes too, but that provision was stripped, so only nicotine disposables are affected.`
The case for the ban is mostly about what happens after the device is empty, not what happens while you’re using it. Lithium-ion batteries that get crushed or punctured in a garbage truck or a materials recovery facility can spark fires that are expensive and dangerous to put out; the bill’s sponsors, including Californians Against Waste and CalPIRG, cite recycling-industry estimates of thousands of such fires nationwide each year.` Irwin has framed it as a consistency argument: “We do not throw away our phones or our laptop after one week of use,” she said, “and we should not treat any other lithium devices differently.”
What it means for you. If you’re in California and rely on disposables, nothing changes today, and nothing changes for over a year: the earliest cutoff is manufacturing and import in 2027, with store shelves affected in 2028. If you want to get ahead of it, or you’re just tired of tossing a device every few days, a refillable pod system is the direct swap. It costs more upfront but works out cheaper per month once you’re buying e-liquid instead of replacing hardware, and refilling means you can dial in your own nicotine strength instead of being locked into whatever a given disposable ships with. Outside California, this doesn’t change anything yet. If Newsom signs it, expect other states to use AB 762 as a template.
Not everyone agrees it will work as intended. The California Fuels & Convenience Alliance, representing gas stations and convenience stores, argues the bill misdiagnoses the problem: most of the illegal, unregulated disposables blamed for litter and fires are already illegal to sell under existing flavor and licensing rules, and banning the compliant, taxed legal disposables on top of that won’t touch the illicit supply, it will just hand it more customers. Law enforcement groups raised similar concerns during committee hearings.
For now, the bill sits with the governor. Newsom hasn’t signaled publicly which way he’ll go, and he’s signed and vetoed vaping-related bills before. If he signs, expect the FDA’s ongoing disposable-flavor enforcement fight and California’s own flavor ban to become part of the same conversation retailers are already having about which devices they can legally stock, and when.
