Factory footage raises concerns over hygiene and worker health

A viral video has revealed that disposable vapes are not only assembled by hand but also tested with mouths. Commentators are concerned both about the factory worker's health and the hygiene of this process.

Social media has been flooded with a short video showing a young man in protective clothing bringing a box of disposable vapes to his mouth and lighting each of them. The person who posted the video on the X portal captioned it: "Every vaporizer is tested by a human? This is amazing, my mate is in a trance, he said he can test 10,000 vapes a day, lol."

The viral clip comes from a longer video on the "Machina" channel on YouTube. Its creators demonstrate how factories operate in China. In the episode: "Do they really mouth-test every vape?" they visited a disposable vape manufacturer in Baoan City in Shenzen Province. In this region of China, 80 percent of the world's disposable vapes are produced.

Both on YouTube and on the X platform, two main themes emerge in the comments. First, the concern for the worker's health, who indeed confirmed in the video that on more intense days, he manages to test over 10,000 disposable vapes. What's more, the man confirmed that he also smokes after hours. Commentators wrote: "Speedrunning lung cancer" or more empathetically: "this kid breaks my heart."

Many people also questioned the hygiene of such a process. As the video creator on YouTube explained, vapes come in so many different "flavours", sizes, and shapes, depending on the brand, that it is not profitable for factories to build automated production lines. Therefore, people perform the vast majority of tasks in dispensing disposables. This also includes testing the flavour and the pressure mechanism, which activates the device when inhaling.

The fact that vapes are tested with mouths sparked a wave of comments like: "So we're all vaping his leftovers? How does that work, lol?" or "Are you telling me I've practically kissed this guy while smoking my grape-cranberry disposables?" In the end, the creator of the video assured that the final process before packaging the finished products is their sterilisation. Interestingly, this stage was not shown in the video.