With
90 per cent of the world's e- cigarettes being made in China, health
experts have warned that poorly manufactured devices can vaporise
heavy metals and carcinogens alongside the nicotine, harming the
users. This year, Chinese manufacturers are expected to ship more
than 300 million e-cigarettes to the US and Europe, where they will
reach the shelves of Walmart, 7-Eleven stores, gas station outlets
and so-called vaping shops. The devices have become increasingly
popular, particularly among young adults, and yet hundreds of e-
cigarette manufacturers in China operate with little oversight, The
New York Times reported. Experts say flawed or sloppy manufacturing
could account for some of the heavy metals, carcinogens and other
dangerous compounds, such as lead, tin and zinc, that have been
detected in some e-cigarettes. One study found e-cigarette vapour
that contained hazardous nickel and chromium at four times the level
they appear in traditional cigarette smoke; another found that half
the e-cigarettes sampled malfunctioned and some released vapour
tainted with silicon fibers. There have also been reports in the US
of e-cigarettes that exploded after a lithium ion battery or electric
charger overheated, causing burns. "We need to understand what
e-cigarettes are made of," says Avrum Spira, a lung specialist
at the Boston University School of Medicine, "and the
manufacturing process is a critical part of that understanding."
A review by The Times of manufacturing operations in Shenzhen, a
booming city in southern China, found that many factories were
legitimate and made efforts at quality control, but that some were
lower-end operations that either had no safety testing equipment or
specialised in counterfeiting established brands, often with cheaper
parts. Chinese companies were the first to develop e-cigarettes, and
that happened in a regulatory void. In the US, the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) has just begun to move toward regulating
e-cigarettes, working on rules that would force global producers, in
China and elsewhere, to provide the agency with a list of ingredients
and details about the manufacturing process. But analysts say setting
those rules and new manufacturing guidelines could take years. In the
meantime, Chinese factories are quickening the pace, hoping to build
profits and market share before regulatory scrutiny arrives and most
likely forces many e-cigarette makers to close.
"This
is really a chaotic industry," says Jackie Zhuang, deputy
general manager of Huabao International, a Chinese tobacco flavouring
company in Shanghai and an expert on China's e-cigarette market. "I
hope it will soon be well regulated." In a five-square-mile area
in the northwestern part of Shenzhen called Bao'an, in a district
packed with industrial parks, there are believed to be more than 600
e-cigarette producers, and many more component suppliers selling bulk
orders of tube casings, integrated circuit boards, heating coils and
lithium ion batteries, the essential components of the e-cigarette.
If you are a manufacturer in Shenzhen and need 50,000 baked-metal
casings, a local manufacturer can supply them for about USD 25,000
and have them delivered within hours. Unlike the counterfeiters'
shops, the largest Shenzhen e-cigarette manufacturing operations are
relatively clean, with rows of workers seated on plastic stools along
a fast- moving assembly line. In 2004, a Chinese pharmacist named Han
Li helped develop the e-cigarette, which was then sold through his
company, Beijing Ruyan. Other manufacturers soon followed, and by
2009, as e-cigarettes became more popular in the United States and
Europe, more factories opened. The boom has made China the breeding
ground for a new, and some would say innovative, product. And yet the
Chinese government has played no role in the development of the
industry or in regulating it. Some Chinese companies, however, are
trying to get ahead of the anticipated FDA rules. First Union is one
of the biggest, operating several manufacturing complexes here in
Shenzhen with about 6,000 employees. Its plants have glass- enclosed,
dust-free rooms that the company says are as clean and sophisticated
as pharmaceutical labs. "We have the same quality-control
standards as medical device makers," said Sunny Xu, the chairman
at First Union. Global tobacco giants that have entered the
e-cigarette market are also manufacturing in China, and they insist
they are doing so with stringent controls. Scientific studies hint at
a host of problems related to poor manufacturing standards. A study
published last year in the open access online journal PLoS One found
the presence of tin particles and other metals in e-cigarette vapors
and said they appeared to come from the “solder joints” of
e-cigarette devices. Another study of nearly two dozen e-cigarettes
bought in the United States found large amounts of nickel and
chromium, which probably came from the heating element, another
suggestion that poorly manufactured e-cigarettes may allow the metals
to enter into the e-liquids. "We've found on the order of 25 or
26 different elements, including metals, in the e-cigarette
aerosols," says Prue Talbot, a professor of cell biology at the
University of California, and co-author of several of the studies.
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