For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM!
To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81 home computer of the early 1980s. The ARM M0 processor does full 32-bit multiplication in hardware, versus the Z80 that doesn't even offer an 8-bit multiply instruction. If we look at some BASIC code doing soft-float computation, as was most common at the time, the execution speed is about 3 orders of magnitude faster, while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less. What an amazing time we live in!
For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably shouldn't end up in a landfill...
Varies widely across country and the type of thing you're recycling. People are so extreme with recycling, it's either "recycle everything!" or "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"
It reminds me of how Sussman talked about someday we'd have computers so small and cheap that we'd mix dozens in our concrete and be put throughout our space.
Why stop there? I think more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly. Trash is an enormous externality. I'm talking about plastic clamshells, container lids, "disposable" storage containers, the lot.
"Why stop there" is often a reason why nothing gets done. Why do small if you can go big right away? Because going big right away is costly (in social cost, in convincing, in how much people need to change behavior, ...) and that prevents people from doing it in the first place because the threshold is high. Apathy is the result. Better to take a small step first, then get used to the measure / the cost, then have a next phase where you do more.
Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Or they made fun of wind power when it was barely 0.1% of energy production. Why not immediately demand 20 years ago that all single use plastic is banned? Or that only wind and solar are allowed? Because the step is too big, it would not be accepted. You need to take one step at a time.
That's even a viable strategy against procrastination. There is this big daunting task. So much to do! Oh my, better scroll a little tiktok first. No, just take a small first step of the task. Very small, no big commitment. Then maybe do some tiktok, but the little first step won't be too much. Result is, you have an immediate sense of accomplishment and actually made progress, maybe even stay hooked with more steps of the ultimately big task.
Yeah, because they suck. Uh, pun not intended. Paper straws get somewhat soggy and feel bad in your mouth. They are inferior to the plastic straws they purport to replace, so people resist them as much as they can.
If you want to actually make a difference with an environmental effort, you need to make something superior. Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front cost aside) they are wildly superior to incandescent. People actually like having LED bulbs and seek them out. The same cannot be said, and likely never will be said, of paper straws.
> more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly
Yeah, we had that. Glass milk bottles and coke bottles and bulk goods sold out of barrels by the lb rather than in plastic bags.
But then plastic took off and soon after Big Sugar paid a PR/lobbying firm to run a campaign with a fake Indian crying a single tear and calling every Tom Dick and Harry a “litterbug” and now the pile of garbage is our fault, not the manufacturers.
Nowadays the homeless or other less-than-living-wage earners do that for us. You can see them everywhere in cities all over north america and europe if you pay attention.
My neighborhood recycling occurs on Thursday night, so I take all my empty cans and put them in a clear plastic back and put them next to my trash. I do not think that the garbage people have ever gotten the cans; there is always a homeless person that will walk around and pick up the bag of empties, presumably to redeem them somewhere.
I don’t have an issue with it, if they want to do what I am too lazy to do, more power to them.
But if you think it through, it's intractable. You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products (it will cost more to get them back for multiple reasons, including products not being as neatly packaged and often going from many-to-one transportation to many-to-many). Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies; you basically make it impossible for small companies to make complicated products. And are we including food products, the majority of trash? It makes a lot more sense to centralize waste repurposing and benefit from economies of scale.
Waste management is already a very profitable industry. Of course, it's wasteful, just burying stuff, and environmentally harmful. But I'm of the opinion that it will soon be economically viable to start mining landfills for different types of enriched materials, and government subsidies could bridge the gap for things that are of greater public interest to recycle.
I've been working on the software side of the technology needed to do this in my spare time for a couple years, waiting for some hardware advancements.
> You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products
As with all economics, it's not a one-way street. A change in conditions causes a change in behavior. Increased costs will cause a change in how products are designed, manufactured, used. If one-time use cost goes through the roof, suddenly all vapes will be multi-use. Plastic bottles will disappear in favor of dispensers and multi-use bottles. Not all of them, but most of.
It's about incentives in a dynamic system, not spot bans in an otherwise static world.
> You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products... Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies
I think 3rd parties would spring up to deal with that stuff
That was tried, and what ultimately occured was disgusting.
The world was full of new computers popping up and every middle class or above person buying new ones like they do with iphones now. Companies started recycling programs, and many immediately went the route of corruption. They would pack up shipping containers full of ewaste, with 40-50% reusable items, and the rest junk, allowing them to skirt the rules. These containers would end up in 3rd world countries, with people standing over a burning pile of ewaste, filtering out reusable metals. There was, at one point, even images of children doing this work. The usable items were sold dirt cheap, with no data erasing, leading to large amounts of data theft, and being able to buy pages of active credit card numbers for a dollar.
We are talking about less critical things now, like vape pens, but its not a far throw for it to instantly become an actually bad idea to let other companies do the recycling. Make the manufacturer deal with it, or even the city/state, via public intake locations (like was mentioned of switzerland in another part of this thread)
The amount of completely useless plastic garbage that we would be sending back east would be mind-numbing. They don’t have anywhere to put that trash either.
So maybe if you make the cost high enough (which is currently just externalized) then they might start disappearing by not being produced in the first place by lack of demand.
People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap.
Switzerland has something like this for "eWaste", it's called the ARC [1] (Advance Recycling Contribution). For any electronic device you purchase a small tax is collected and used for the recycling and collection of the future waste it will generate.
The collection mandatorily happens in the shops that sell electronic devices, you don't have to return them to the exact store where it was purchased, as long as they sell similar devices they cannot refuse to take it back (without paying anything more). It works pretty well, even if shop owners/workers aren't always pleasant when you return something.
We have it in California, just for monitors for some reason, but on Jan 1 a new law covering battery-embedded devices took effect. That new one specifically doesn't tax vapes (???)
If people had to pay the true cost of their decisions up-front, we'd make a lot of different decisions.
That said, I got quite into this stuff a few years back, and determining "true" cost can be harder than it sounds. Externalities, positive or negative, have to be measured against a baseline, and deciding on where that sits is subject to opinion and bias.
All petroleum products come from the fossilized remains of the first trees to evolve lignin, which was tough and durable enough to allow trees to grow taller, but also too tough and durable for any other living things to decompose it. At the time, fallen trees would not rot, and the resulting buildup of wood all over the place caused all sorts of ecological problems. Many of those trees ended up buried deep underground before microbes could evolve the means to eat them, where they became fossilized and turned into coal and petroleum, which we eventually turned into plastic.
Now, that plastic is too tough and durable for any modern microbes to decompose it, and it's starting to build up too. It stands to reason that microbes will eventually evolve the means to digest it and make use of this abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already have [1], but it's still early days.
I'm not pro-pollution, but this is far from the first ecological disaster that the global ecosystem can probably adapt to.
> It stands to reason that microbes will eventually evolve the means to digest it and make use of this abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already have [1], but it's still early days.
That’s a hell of a way to kick the can down the road.
I don’t have sea views, but if I wait, sea views are coming.
It's an externality because the entity that sold it to you doesn't have to pay the consequences of dealing with the trash. OP said "dispose of it properly," which could mean a lot of things, all of which are better than leaving it on a beach.
Trash disposal (to regulated landfills, not beaches) is enormously inexpensive and increasing the cost of every item through a laborious return program doesn't improve anything.
> Nearly all the plastic humans have made still exists.
And it just doesn't matter. It's a tiny amount of mass / volume.
> The great garbage patch in the Pacific is growing fast.
Ocean plastics are almost entirely a consequence of (particularly Indonesian) fishing net waste, not Western consumer products disposed of in managed landfills. The "great garbage patch" is also very much overstating the scale of the problem; it's a slightly higher plastic density region of ocean.
7 billion kg at the density of water would fit in a cube 200 m on each side.
All the plastic ever produced could be stuffed back into one medium size coal mine. There are thousands of such mines and they are already ecologically disruptive.
It's a large amount when you think about the logistics to move it around the world, but a small amount compared to the total amount of stuff we take out of the earth.
The main thing about plastic is that it’s made from oil, and oil already exists in the ground. Putting it back into the ground is basically neutral minus the pollution involved in manufacturing.
> Even if the retailer took it back it would still be... trash.
Yes, but making them deal with it would create a massive incentive to either reduce the amount of rubbish they make, or to make it recyclable/processable.
Why though? Bottles/cans are easily recycled and I believe the small reimbursement is easily recovered during the recycling costs.
It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive.
100 times the deposit amount would be like $5-10 USD per-device which is insane. I do agree that any retailers should be required to take back empties and dispose of them responsibly.
> It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive.
Sounds like they should be banning their sale and/or production then, just like many jurisdictions have been with plastics and other non-recyclable items. These devices are not an essential-to-life item where the waste produced is justifiable, especially when you consider the LiPo batteries, which are a borderline-environmental disaster from the moment the lithium is mined to the day that battery finds its way to a landfill. Why single-use disposable vaping devices exist in the first place is somewhat perplexing given permanent/re-fillable ones are also available, often right beside the disposable ones, and generally offer a significantly lower cost of ownership.
That's a good point. In America we call this type of deposit a "core charge." The "core" is the component you return to the store to get your deposit back.
This is done for components like starter motors, alternators, power steering pumps, batteries, and a variety of other components. The complex components are re-manufactured to like-new specifications and the less complex components are recycled to recover materials. The battery is a probably the only component where the potential ecological impact drives the cost of the deposit.
I never thought about it but it is odd car-components are the only thing most people will experience with a "core" charge. Why don't more industries do something similar? Is it just because car ownership and car repair has been such a core (no pun intended) component of American culture? That a system of recycling has been set up?
You paying a nonzero cost for creating a negative externality is an improvement compared to the status quo, in the context of this economic philosophy of discouraging production of negative externalities by aligning economic incentives.
The problem is you can’t find any company willing to recycle them. Because of the nicotine content, I’ve heard e-waste recyclers consider them hazardous waste and refuse to touch them.
yeah, e-waste recyclers suck, they love to ship it all to the 3rd world where piles of circuit boards get tossed in an open fire and stirred by kids to reclaim the metals.
He put a fuse on every individual cell and on the overall unit, so I would say he was reasonably cautious (although he deployed a bunch of high-voltage exposed wires at the end of the video, but we can assume that was just a tech demo).
I've just started a Salvage Pile in my workshop. Laser printer with fax modem was the first for excision and harvest. I could feel the addiction take hold before the last of the plastic shell was tossed into the refuse bin. The stepper motors alone!
I have a huge old microwave on the blocks next. After that a series of small odd ball electronic toys and a few early LED bulbs. If I ever come across a vape, I'm sure it'll make its way on to the shelf.
With regards to the microwave, here’s a token “please safely discharge and double check the cap” comment!
With regards to vapes, just look on the ground near a sidewalk. I find like 3 or 4 big depleted vapes a day in a US urban area. Closer to 15 or 20 in greater London in the UK.
As a second regards the microwave, depending on the age, please be extremely careful about the magnetron the insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide, which can kill you.
There are a lot of fun parts inside microwaves (a personal favorite is the high-torque-low-speed-line-voltage motor, which I use to make creepy Halloween decorations) but the caps, transformer, and magnetron are all useful for somewhat... more dangerous... pursuits.
the insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide
As far as I can tell, this is an urban legend. No consumer microwave oven has ever used beryllium in its magnetron insulators. Military radar ones, yes (and likely where the legend started.) Some specialist test equipment and RF transmitters too, and they all contain prominent warnings of it. Besides its toxicity, it's far more expensive than regular alumina.
That's my understanding as well, but I still wouldn't disassemble a 1960s microwave without protection (I have assisted in the dismantling of a couple microwave communications devices which did contain BeO and were also very well-labeled as such). Anything from the 80s on at least is almost certainly aluminum.
Sort of. "Single use disposables" were banned, but the companies switched immediately to a two-part unit which, AFAICT, is still used and thrown away in exactly the same fashion.
Currently working on a method to recycle / repurpose the li-ion cells obtained from the disposable vapes, trying to scale up the recycling effort by releasing products to fund the manpower required to breakdown and sort the vape components . Getting close to releasing the first 100 demo models of the product for stress testing in the wild. Currently based in the greater Seattle area and here is a link to my site if anyone wanted to know more:
https://2ndchancemnd.com/
The reason disposables are so popular in the US is the FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables. The immense battery waste is a direct result of a relatively new law.
I think just an oversight—disposables weren't really around at the time the time that the ban happened. 2019, people were mostly smoking Juul and having those crazy custom rigs that they fill with the juice. Disposables really started to take off around 2021 - 2022. Atleast that's what I saw with people around me in NY and California.
Yeah, in my state, with disposable I can get any flavor. But if I want juice or pods, I can only get nasty tobacco flavor. It's an easy choice.
Also, when you do get juice online or from other states, it doesn't hit as hard / the same as whatever they put in the disposables. Someone told me it's because the disposables have vitamin E acetate in them that makes the nicotine get absorbed into your blood quicker.
I think the disposables go around more regulations, which mean the chinese manufacturers can put more addictive stuff in the pods / disposables.
The FDA just hates flavored nicotine products because they're appealing (to both adults and children), and the FDA doesn't want nicotine products to be appealing (because nicotine is perceived to be a public health problem on the scale of tobacco).
Did that in Australia - the problem is even worse now. Disposable vapes were a market response to banning and restricting pod vapes (where you can keep the base and just swap out the pod).
Nicotine policy and policing has been a clusterf - not only are there wasteful disposable vapes everywhere, but a thriving black market that has lead to firebombings and murders.
Sounds like they didnt ban it properly. There aren't really nicotine junkies like heroin. So I suspect ban nicotine and slowly everyone stops using nicotine sources.
Everyone I know who vapes nicotine is a junkie about it.
In fact, nicotine habits can be harder to kick than heroin. I know plenty of people who have tried to kick nicotine many times and cannot stay off of it.
Anyway, it's moot, because outright banning tobacco is insane.
Kind of odd because the withdrawal is, physically, less taxing than caffeine (never mind opiates...), and yet the brain rewiring to chase the hit is somehow far more pernicious.
New Zealand was making really good progress on getting down the smoking rate with a variety of measures (primarily ramping the tax).
The current government has started rolling back decades of progress, and SURPRISE, they have close ties to the tobacco industry including MPs who worked for tobacco companies.
As mentioned upthread, Australia has been running a similar strategy of trying to tax smoking out of existence and all that's happened is they've rediscovered the Laffer curve as well as pushing otherwise law-abiding citizens towards illegal tobacco.
There's a limit to how much sin tax people are prepared to put up with. Either its legal to consume or it's not, and vapes are far less objectionable to be near by than traditional cigarettes. It bemuses me that Aus, NZ, Singapore etc have gone down the path of trying to ban vape usage when the alternative is far worse.
NZ isn’t trying to ban it, not at all. Winston Peters loves tobacco. This government loves the tobacco industry, to the extent that it has them helping with legislation (industry documents mysteriously getting used to write policy). Casey Costello is a corrupt joke.
Having just spent a bit of time travelling, I think vapes are worse to be near than cigarettes or cigars.
Walking down busy street in the UK is just so gross. The sickly sweet strawberry, cinnamon etc. I’d prefer tobacco smoke.
And at least there was some etiquette around tobacco smoking. You don’t often encounter it inside, in planes, trains, theatres, malls etc. all those were going on this month.
Singapore and AFAIK Thailand banned vapes altogether. And it seems to be actually enforced.
They have completely different grounds for it but still, there's already some movement in this space.
Not. I've seen young teenagers vape in Thailand, that's how enforced it is. They only catch foreigners from whom they can extract thousand-dollar bribes.
They are straight up banned in Australia but you often see them chucked in the gutters and rivers. Only seems like they started raiding the stores in the last few months.
The vape ban in Australia is utterly stupid though. All vapes are banned, not just disposables, and guess what's easier to discretely sell to kids from a newsagency.
Doesn't seem to have stopped kids getting their vapes yet I need to import my cannabis vape via the black market.
They're not all banned, you just need a prescription to get one which realistically should've been implemented day 0.
Eventually it'll prove very impactful with the youth, it'll reduce the number of users and make it more cost prohibitive to be so prolific as it is right now.
Why do we need to ban these? I'm not trying to be contrarian, but why do some people appear to be for banning tobacco but not alcohol? I don't claim to have all the answers or even strong opinions, but if your going to ban one recreational drug with negative externalities you should ban them all. I'd much rather hear people's opinions then ask AI.
> If alcohol came inside of little battery powered computers, we should ban those too.
I too am agnostic but do not understand this reasoning. BTW let me get severely downvoted by saying that if alcohol prohibition came up for a vote I'd vote yes in a heartbeat.
It doesn't stop addicts from craving and it doesn't curb the appeal of the product. People who think tobacco/nicotine bans would work are people who think they don't have any positive effect associated with them.
People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted. It's a drug, it feels good to do it.
A tobacco/nicotine ban will end up exactly like aby other recreational drug prohibition.
> People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted.
Isn't this exactly what happens, and why cigarette advertising is banned in many countries, and why marketing child-friendly tobacco products is commonly restricted, and why there are even regulations/guidelines around portrayal of smoking on TV in some regions?
They do seem to be banned in an around 10 states at this point though there is some sort of existing stock law or something so if you ask them you still seem to be able to buy them. They don’t seem to be on display anymore though.
After-school tech club idea: instead of just handing kids an Arduino, tell them to get their purloined vapes out of their pockets and hack 'em till you get JTAG or semixosting working.
I still think the next evolution of these vapes is for a Tamagotchi-esque device to get built into them and to have the pet grow when you inhale through it. You're already walking around with enough tech - why not gamify it more?
Put it this way, from engineering and technology perpective vape is equivalent to generalization of smoking tools (cigarette, pipe, etc). Naturally it's a very complex as a system and no small feat because you are going to generalize relativity and AI, for examples general relativity and AGI, respectively.
Doesn't look like SMD was great. This looks like lowest cost has gone back to .. rows of people with a soldering iron patching the cheapest possible flow process.
It's not rediculous if you look at this through a modern lens. In reality this tech is cheap. Trying to keep it around is hoarder mentality. You are stockpiling garbage which can be cheaply replaced.
The ESP32 (with Bluetooth and WiFi) is like $5 on AMZN. Which is probably sub-$2 in any meaningful quantity in Shenzhen. We've been living, at least until the tariffs, in a StarTrek like world where whatever we want is available from Shenzhen for a ridiculously low price (which in many respects is better than "free" because "free" brings with it its own humongous problems).
These products are targeted towards high school teens and middle schoolers, carry a number of serious health risks, and anyone involved in making them can rot in hell.
I'm amazed there isn't more of an outcry against these things. I'm not an environmental activist, but even I'd feel wrong just throwing something like that away.
And this, kids, this is how an adult sucks when he tries to adulting.
And if you want for people to reconsider something they are doing you reaaaally shouldn't insult them in the first place. Even if you are grown-ass adult who can't stand that something.
To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81 home computer of the early 1980s. The ARM M0 processor does full 32-bit multiplication in hardware, versus the Z80 that doesn't even offer an 8-bit multiply instruction. If we look at some BASIC code doing soft-float computation, as was most common at the time, the execution speed is about 3 orders of magnitude faster, while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less. What an amazing time we live in!
It’s beautiful, I love it.
Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a scam.
These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the 'empties' back.
Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Or they made fun of wind power when it was barely 0.1% of energy production. Why not immediately demand 20 years ago that all single use plastic is banned? Or that only wind and solar are allowed? Because the step is too big, it would not be accepted. You need to take one step at a time.
That's even a viable strategy against procrastination. There is this big daunting task. So much to do! Oh my, better scroll a little tiktok first. No, just take a small first step of the task. Very small, no big commitment. Then maybe do some tiktok, but the little first step won't be too much. Result is, you have an immediate sense of accomplishment and actually made progress, maybe even stay hooked with more steps of the ultimately big task.
Yeah, because they suck. Uh, pun not intended. Paper straws get somewhat soggy and feel bad in your mouth. They are inferior to the plastic straws they purport to replace, so people resist them as much as they can.
If you want to actually make a difference with an environmental effort, you need to make something superior. Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front cost aside) they are wildly superior to incandescent. People actually like having LED bulbs and seek them out. The same cannot be said, and likely never will be said, of paper straws.
Yeah, we had that. Glass milk bottles and coke bottles and bulk goods sold out of barrels by the lb rather than in plastic bags.
But then plastic took off and soon after Big Sugar paid a PR/lobbying firm to run a campaign with a fake Indian crying a single tear and calling every Tom Dick and Harry a “litterbug” and now the pile of garbage is our fault, not the manufacturers.
I don’t have an issue with it, if they want to do what I am too lazy to do, more power to them.
Maybe the process could be emulated.
Any items found by garbage program will be collected and returned to manufacturer at cost.
All items sold in country must be identifiable for this purpose. Importers are considered the manufacturers and must retrofit products.
Then we would be getting closer to capturing the total burden to society.
Well that Charmin bear will certainly have his work cut out for him
But if you think it through, it's intractable. You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products (it will cost more to get them back for multiple reasons, including products not being as neatly packaged and often going from many-to-one transportation to many-to-many). Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies; you basically make it impossible for small companies to make complicated products. And are we including food products, the majority of trash? It makes a lot more sense to centralize waste repurposing and benefit from economies of scale.
Waste management is already a very profitable industry. Of course, it's wasteful, just burying stuff, and environmentally harmful. But I'm of the opinion that it will soon be economically viable to start mining landfills for different types of enriched materials, and government subsidies could bridge the gap for things that are of greater public interest to recycle.
I've been working on the software side of the technology needed to do this in my spare time for a couple years, waiting for some hardware advancements.
As with all economics, it's not a one-way street. A change in conditions causes a change in behavior. Increased costs will cause a change in how products are designed, manufactured, used. If one-time use cost goes through the roof, suddenly all vapes will be multi-use. Plastic bottles will disappear in favor of dispensers and multi-use bottles. Not all of them, but most of.
It's about incentives in a dynamic system, not spot bans in an otherwise static world.
I think 3rd parties would spring up to deal with that stuff
The world was full of new computers popping up and every middle class or above person buying new ones like they do with iphones now. Companies started recycling programs, and many immediately went the route of corruption. They would pack up shipping containers full of ewaste, with 40-50% reusable items, and the rest junk, allowing them to skirt the rules. These containers would end up in 3rd world countries, with people standing over a burning pile of ewaste, filtering out reusable metals. There was, at one point, even images of children doing this work. The usable items were sold dirt cheap, with no data erasing, leading to large amounts of data theft, and being able to buy pages of active credit card numbers for a dollar.
We are talking about less critical things now, like vape pens, but its not a far throw for it to instantly become an actually bad idea to let other companies do the recycling. Make the manufacturer deal with it, or even the city/state, via public intake locations (like was mentioned of switzerland in another part of this thread)
People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap.
The collection mandatorily happens in the shops that sell electronic devices, you don't have to return them to the exact store where it was purchased, as long as they sell similar devices they cannot refuse to take it back (without paying anything more). It works pretty well, even if shop owners/workers aren't always pleasant when you return something.
[1] https://www.erecycling.ch/en/privatpersonen/blog/vRB-Vorgezo...
https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/covered-electronic-waste...
A lot of people wouldn’t want this because it’s asking for stuff to become more expensive for them.
That said, I got quite into this stuff a few years back, and determining "true" cost can be harder than it sounds. Externalities, positive or negative, have to be measured against a baseline, and deciding on where that sits is subject to opinion and bias.
Every bit of plastic humans have made still exits, bar a small amount we have burnt.
That’s concerning.
Now, that plastic is too tough and durable for any modern microbes to decompose it, and it's starting to build up too. It stands to reason that microbes will eventually evolve the means to digest it and make use of this abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already have [1], but it's still early days.
I'm not pro-pollution, but this is far from the first ecological disaster that the global ecosystem can probably adapt to.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_degradation_by_marine_...
* https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_formation
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum
these other sources all assert that
That’s a hell of a way to kick the can down the road.
I don’t have sea views, but if I wait, sea views are coming.
I'm not kidding :)
The great garbage patch in the Pacific is growing fast. The plastic is ending up in everything. We need to do better.
Make less waste. Use less plastic.
And it just doesn't matter. It's a tiny amount of mass / volume.
> The great garbage patch in the Pacific is growing fast.
Ocean plastics are almost entirely a consequence of (particularly Indonesian) fishing net waste, not Western consumer products disposed of in managed landfills. The "great garbage patch" is also very much overstating the scale of the problem; it's a slightly higher plastic density region of ocean.
Are you sure? It’s getting into food. We are eating it and drinking it, and it’s getting more prevalent.
Because 7Bn people multiplied by a few kg/year doesn't seem trivial to me, but sounds like you can prove it.
All the plastic ever produced could be stuffed back into one medium size coal mine. There are thousands of such mines and they are already ecologically disruptive.
It's a large amount when you think about the logistics to move it around the world, but a small amount compared to the total amount of stuff we take out of the earth.
Yes, but making them deal with it would create a massive incentive to either reduce the amount of rubbish they make, or to make it recyclable/processable.
Also many countries collect disposable plastic.
It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive.
100 times the deposit amount would be like $5-10 USD per-device which is insane. I do agree that any retailers should be required to take back empties and dispose of them responsibly.
Sounds like they should be banning their sale and/or production then, just like many jurisdictions have been with plastics and other non-recyclable items. These devices are not an essential-to-life item where the waste produced is justifiable, especially when you consider the LiPo batteries, which are a borderline-environmental disaster from the moment the lithium is mined to the day that battery finds its way to a landfill. Why single-use disposable vaping devices exist in the first place is somewhat perplexing given permanent/re-fillable ones are also available, often right beside the disposable ones, and generally offer a significantly lower cost of ownership.
I suspect you could make the same argument for manufactured cigarettes vs pipe tobacco. It seems people will pay for convenience.
This is done for components like starter motors, alternators, power steering pumps, batteries, and a variety of other components. The complex components are re-manufactured to like-new specifications and the less complex components are recycled to recover materials. The battery is a probably the only component where the potential ecological impact drives the cost of the deposit.
Here's a slightly old investigation finding 40% of ewaste being shipped off to china: https://www.ban.org/news-new/2016/9/15/secret-tracking-proje...
Is this person really brave, or just unaware of the risks?
https://www.lumafield.com/article/finding-hidden-risks-in-th...
I have a huge old microwave on the blocks next. After that a series of small odd ball electronic toys and a few early LED bulbs. If I ever come across a vape, I'm sure it'll make its way on to the shelf.
With regards to vapes, just look on the ground near a sidewalk. I find like 3 or 4 big depleted vapes a day in a US urban area. Closer to 15 or 20 in greater London in the UK.
There are a lot of fun parts inside microwaves (a personal favorite is the high-torque-low-speed-line-voltage motor, which I use to make creepy Halloween decorations) but the caps, transformer, and magnetron are all useful for somewhat... more dangerous... pursuits.
As far as I can tell, this is an urban legend. No consumer microwave oven has ever used beryllium in its magnetron insulators. Military radar ones, yes (and likely where the legend started.) Some specialist test equipment and RF transmitters too, and they all contain prominent warnings of it. Besides its toxicity, it's far more expensive than regular alumina.
Weren't disposable vapes banned in UK in May 2025? Is the problem still that big?
Wait, what? Where's the sense in that?
Also, when you do get juice online or from other states, it doesn't hit as hard / the same as whatever they put in the disposables. Someone told me it's because the disposables have vitamin E acetate in them that makes the nicotine get absorbed into your blood quicker.
I think the disposables go around more regulations, which mean the chinese manufacturers can put more addictive stuff in the pods / disposables.
The FDA just hates flavored nicotine products because they're appealing (to both adults and children), and the FDA doesn't want nicotine products to be appealing (because nicotine is perceived to be a public health problem on the scale of tobacco).
I hate anything added to the air. Even perfumes irritate and make me sneeze in high quantity.
Nicotine policy and policing has been a clusterf - not only are there wasteful disposable vapes everywhere, but a thriving black market that has lead to firebombings and murders.
In fact, nicotine habits can be harder to kick than heroin. I know plenty of people who have tried to kick nicotine many times and cannot stay off of it.
Anyway, it's moot, because outright banning tobacco is insane.
Kind of odd because the withdrawal is, physically, less taxing than caffeine (never mind opiates...), and yet the brain rewiring to chase the hit is somehow far more pernicious.
You can't "just ban" it or "ban it properly". You would get a very nasty black market and things with such ban.
The current government has started rolling back decades of progress, and SURPRISE, they have close ties to the tobacco industry including MPs who worked for tobacco companies.
As mentioned upthread, Australia has been running a similar strategy of trying to tax smoking out of existence and all that's happened is they've rediscovered the Laffer curve as well as pushing otherwise law-abiding citizens towards illegal tobacco.
There's a limit to how much sin tax people are prepared to put up with. Either its legal to consume or it's not, and vapes are far less objectionable to be near by than traditional cigarettes. It bemuses me that Aus, NZ, Singapore etc have gone down the path of trying to ban vape usage when the alternative is far worse.
"The more you tighten your grip .. " etc.
Having just spent a bit of time travelling, I think vapes are worse to be near than cigarettes or cigars.
Walking down busy street in the UK is just so gross. The sickly sweet strawberry, cinnamon etc. I’d prefer tobacco smoke.
And at least there was some etiquette around tobacco smoking. You don’t often encounter it inside, in planes, trains, theatres, malls etc. all those were going on this month.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/573271/casey-costello-b...
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/579431/absolutely-ludicr...
Doesn't seem to have stopped kids getting their vapes yet I need to import my cannabis vape via the black market.
Eventually it'll prove very impactful with the youth, it'll reduce the number of users and make it more cost prohibitive to be so prolific as it is right now.
I don't think the post you're responding to is saying that vapes should be banned. Just disposable ones.
I too am agnostic but do not understand this reasoning. BTW let me get severely downvoted by saying that if alcohol prohibition came up for a vote I'd vote yes in a heartbeat.
It doesn't stop addicts from craving and it doesn't curb the appeal of the product. People who think tobacco/nicotine bans would work are people who think they don't have any positive effect associated with them.
People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted. It's a drug, it feels good to do it.
A tobacco/nicotine ban will end up exactly like aby other recreational drug prohibition.
Isn't this exactly what happens, and why cigarette advertising is banned in many countries, and why marketing child-friendly tobacco products is commonly restricted, and why there are even regulations/guidelines around portrayal of smoking on TV in some regions?
"One man's trash is another man's treasure."
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-a-dispo...
You want to make vaping even more addictive than it already is?
Basically the weapons from "High on Life" or the butter robot from Rick and Morty, but as a vape.
Which 10 Cent Microcontroller is Right for You? Comparing the CH32V003 to the PY32F002A.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-n7vXHAqm8
Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252817
> sucking on the teat
And this, kids, this is how an adult sucks when he tries to adulting.
And if you want for people to reconsider something they are doing you reaaaally shouldn't insult them in the first place. Even if you are grown-ass adult who can't stand that something.