Finding discarded e-cigarettes on streets and at the beach has become as commonplace as finding plastic bags, coffee pods and other waste in those locations. But officials are hard-pressed to come up with a solution, namely because the e-cigarettes are devices that are both part-hazardous waste and part-recyclable.

"We started seeing them a number of years ago," said Cindy Zipf, executive director of Clean Ocean Action, a nonprofit organization that compiles biannual beach-cleanup reports from the Jersey Shore. "Most of us didn't even know what they were."

Since their introduction to the market back in 2006, e-cigarette use has exploded with an estimated 2 million middle and high school students now regular users of the devices.

Made up of components such as plastic, residual nicotine, aluminum, fabric and lithium batteries, e-cigarettes require disassembling the entire device to separately recycle each component.

One city exploring possible solutions to the e-cigarette issue is Philadelphia. According to that city’s environmental planning director, Scott McGrath, the city has been seeking guidance from both third-party electronic and hazardous waste vendors as the devices can be categorized under both.

Ideally, according to McGrath, manufacturers would be required to take the devices back, yet that seems unlikely as some manufacturers even encourage e-cigarette users to simply “toss out” the devices.

According to a 2017 Business Insider article, e-cigarette giant Juul manufactures roughly 20 million pods a month.

"Juul pods are closed systems and are not intended to be refilled. They can be thrown away in a regular trash can," the company states on its website. However, also on their site, the company recommends treating the rechargeable part of the device like a cell phone and following the "local recommendations for disposing of a lithium-polymer rechargeable battery."

With other e-cigarette manufacturers not offering guidance or discontinuing their own recycling-exchange programs, TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based company that recycles hard-to-recycle waste, is among the few companies around the world accepting all e-cigarette components for the purpose of recycling.

"They are far more difficult to recycle than regular cigarettes because of the number of components," said Ernel Simpson, global vice president of research and development for TerraCycle.

As such, TerraCycle sells collection boxes, ranging in price from $100 to $250 that can be shipped back to the company once they have been filled.

"Using it once and tossing it is not sustainable," Simpson said.