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!
Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become.
Now that it is a pity that when people talk about saving the planet everyone keeps rushing to dispoable electronics, what serves me to go by bycicle to work, be vegetarian, recicle my garbage, if everyone is dumping tablets, phones and magnificient thin laptops into the ground, and vapes of course.
> Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become.
Yet, I still need to wait about 1 second (!) after each key press when buying a parking ticket and the machine wants me to enter my license plate number. The latency is so huge I initially thought the machine was broken. I guess it’s not the chip problem but terrible programming due to developers thinking they don’t need to care about performance because their chip runs in megahertz.
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 varies very widely indeed. In some countries it isn't a scam because it gets burned like Denmark but other than that majority of recycling just means shipping it to a landfill in a poor country that they promise to recycle.
This youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle".
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.
It feels so odd to think that the human which is self poisoning with an electronic device that will be neglectedly thrown on public area is not that different from the one who would diligently bring it to a trash, even curiosity didn't jump in to enjoy analysis of the device.
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.
Most paper straws use PFAS, meaning we’re actively composting PFAS in a fantasy effort to feel good about our waste without actually giving anything up
paper straws do not make any sense any way you look at it. Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
Moreover, paper straws are not even recyclable due to water content which makes them soggy. Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
> Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
It’s more okay to make things out of paper than plastic, yes. Plastic waste and microplastics are a huge problem. Trees are a renewable resource.
> Moreover, paper straws are not even recyclable due to water content which makes them soggy. Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
Plastic straws are almost never (literally never?) recycled. Paper straws are supposed to be fully biodegradable.
> Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
But yes, this and the usability issue make the other points moot (n.b. leaching harmful chemicals is a concern that also applies to plastic straws and paper cups). The vast majority of existing straws should be replaced with no straw, and most beyond that with reusable straws.
But usually paper and cardboard that has been in contact with food is not recyclable because it contaminates the batch. That's why pizza boxes also cannot go into the cardboard/paper fraction.
> Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
Uhh.. yes? Trees can be grown, just like any agriculture product.
> Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
In theory. However that rarely works out in practice, due to the complications of mixing various types of plastic in a single stream of garbage.
> Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
The glue for paper straws will be a biodegradable water-based adhesive. It may be finished with natural wax. And that's it. I think you are intentionally spreading FUD saying glue and chemicals.
That being said, I hate paper straws. I like bamboo straws though.
You're missing the fact that this sort of infrastructure requires a robust business case. That's why scale is critical.
Recycling bottles and cans has a solid business case. Glass and aluminium are straight forward to recycle at an industrial scale, but would be pointless if they were kept at an artisanal scale.
Any moralistic argument is pointless if you can't put together a coherent business plan. The people you need to work and the energy you need to spend to gather and process whatever you want to process needs to come from somewhere. How many vape pens do you need to recycle per month to support employing a single person? Guilt trips from random people online don't pay that person's rent, do they?
> Everybody makes fun of paper straws.
This is specious reasoning. The core issue are tradeoffs, and what you have to tolerate or abdicate. Paper straws are a red herring because the main criticism was that, at the start, they failed to work as straws. So you were left with an industrial demand to produce a product that failed to work and was still disposable.
If you look at food packaging and containers, you are faced with more thought-provoking tradeoffs. Paper containers don't help preserve food as well as plastic ones. Packaging deteriorates if exposed to any form of moisture, and contaminates food so quickly tk the point you can taste cardboard if you leave them overnight. This leads to shorter shelf life and more food waste. Is food waste not an ecological problem? How do you manage those tradeoffs?
> 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.
As European that is not spread everywhere, while you can get some money back in Germany and Greece, there is none to be had in Portugal.
In Germany, it is such a big issue with people not having other source of income, that there is a culture where and how to leave the bottles around so that they are easier to collect.
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.
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.
Same here in the Netherlands. But only for larger appliances. Washing machines for instance. Smaller ones you have to be able to send for free but there are too many exceptions. My internet provider switched out the modems and simply said "it's yours now, for free!" Meaning: we don't want to pay for disposing of our inventory. I send it to their free postage address they use for broken items with a brick, since they are charged per kg.
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 (???)
You're thinking disposable vapes, but this will apply to quality of life appliances like washing machines as well, right?
Do you want to live in a world where only the rich can afford washing machines?
Incidentally, I don't know what you do, but once in a while I throw (carefully, li-ion batteries) my broken electronics in the trunk and bring them to the local collection center.
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.
Why would 2x the transportation cost be intractable, but ruining the environment, killing life in the oceans, destroying the basis of our future food production, etc, be tractable?
> 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
Maybe they could use big trucks that just collect all refuse from the curb. And maybe that is something that the city should do so that we don’t have a dozen trucks collecting a dozen different trash cans from every house.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Geological strata vs shallow landfill sitting above aquifers and subject to near-term erosion.
Disposing of this stuff in deep mines seems like it'd be fine, unfortunately we haven't yet, at a society/economy level, found the discipline to do so. Presumably after a few mya of heat and pressure it'll be indistinguishable from other petrochemicals (which aren't particularly nice to begin with).
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.
For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal.
As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place, and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke down, or call the city hall to collect it.
We should go back to the old days, when electronics were repairable, which naturally companies will lobby against, as that will break down the capitalistic curve of exponential growth in sales.
Based on your reply you haven't fully considered context. Smokers don't care about themselves or else they wouldn't smoke. As demonstrated by the article, you can see proof that they also don't care for the environment. What makes you think people who intentionally pay to kill themselves and then throw the waste on the ground instead of trash will ever recycle?
They should just be banned outright. In no world is this going to end up in bins 100% of the time. Disposable really means it’s destined for the trash at best, and just simply litter at worst.
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.
That doesn't explain why vapes are so rife elsewhere, particularly the UK. They're popular because, as the FT described, they're the ultimate product. Cool, cheap and addictive.
Kids don't have to hide proof of their consumption in their bedroom (well at least until they are hooked enough they can't spend a night without vaping). They buy, consume and throw away before reaching home.
Surprisingly, Big Tobacco does not really likes vapes because it's not them, and eats in their profit margin. If any, they lobby against vapes and specifically disposable vapes.
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?
People have been stealing and killing other people as many years if not longer. That doesn't mean you cannot do a bit of legislation and obtain some positive results against that.
I think not banning the cigarette and non reusable vape is the wrong solution but banning smoking in lots of public spaces has improved the situation, maybe not to curb consumption but at least non smokers can breath a little. I wish it would also applies to outdoors cafe/restaurant terraces too as smokers effectively ban to non smokers by spreading their poison around them. They could walk away for a couple of minutes to get their hit but they don't on purpose. There should be a radius around an outdoor terrace where smoking is effectively prohibited.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Is this actually disposable if it has the rechargeable battery and display? Or is it maybe like a lighter that technically can be refilled but nobody ever does?
It's so curious why these things are addictive. Before I tried a vape (it was called an e-cigarette back then) I thought the addictive thing about cigarettes is the nicotine. That's part of it, but a huge part (possibly even bigger) is just the sensation of sucking in smoke/vapour from a little stick and exhaling it. Is it similar to sucking on a mother's teat or something? It really seems to satisfy in a way nothing else does.
In the UK truly disposable vapes are banned, thankfully, but I do wonder if it's now just "technically refillable" ones that people use one time. They should be taxed to the eyeballs to encourage reuse if so.
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.
The only realistic risk so far is addiction and a nicotine addiction doesn’t ruin lives. Other than that it’s marginally bad for the heart and so far atleast not carcinogenic.
You cannot say "better" in this context without an almost endless degree of quantification that could fill textbooks. By what metric? Public health? Cost effectiveness? Environmental impact? How do we measure these things? I assume you're arguing a health perspective (which, at this point all we can say is probably better), but in the context of TFA "better" is more likely to be interpreted in an environmental context, of which I haven't really been convinced either way.
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.
Edit: You were complaining about 'environmental' HN users, but now you've edited your comment. I guess you read the article and were convinced, that's great :)
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.
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.
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!
Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become.
Now that it is a pity that when people talk about saving the planet everyone keeps rushing to dispoable electronics, what serves me to go by bycicle to work, be vegetarian, recicle my garbage, if everyone is dumping tablets, phones and magnificient thin laptops into the ground, and vapes of course.
> Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become.
Yet, I still need to wait about 1 second (!) after each key press when buying a parking ticket and the machine wants me to enter my license plate number. The latency is so huge I initially thought the machine was broken. I guess it’s not the chip problem but terrible programming due to developers thinking they don’t need to care about performance because their chip runs in megahertz.
The idea that people are smoking arm chips makes me laugh.
Technical Boy's vape is here: https://giphy.com/gifs/americangods-vape-american-gods-26BGN...
How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications?
What a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be “disposable”.
It’s beautiful, I love it.
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...
To make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions).
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 varies very widely indeed. In some countries it isn't a scam because it gets burned like Denmark but other than that majority of recycling just means shipping it to a landfill in a poor country that they promise to recycle.
> because it gets burned
I wouldn’t really call that recycling.
Can you elaborate on that?
Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a scam.
This youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
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.
I've bought hundreds of Puya's for my lab stock on LCSC. Neat little things!
It feels so odd to think that the human which is self poisoning with an electronic device that will be neglectedly thrown on public area is not that different from the one who would diligently bring it to a trash, even curiosity didn't jump in to enjoy analysis of the device.
Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans but an electronic device with a lipo battery is seen as perfectly fine to throw away.
These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the 'empties' back.
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.
> Everybody makes fun of paper straws.
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.
Most paper straws use PFAS, meaning we’re actively composting PFAS in a fantasy effort to feel good about our waste without actually giving anything up
https://fortune.com/well/2023/08/24/paper-straws-harmful-for...
paper straws do not make any sense any way you look at it. Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
Moreover, paper straws are not even recyclable due to water content which makes them soggy. Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
> Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
It’s more okay to make things out of paper than plastic, yes. Plastic waste and microplastics are a huge problem. Trees are a renewable resource.
> Moreover, paper straws are not even recyclable due to water content which makes them soggy. Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
Plastic straws are almost never (literally never?) recycled. Paper straws are supposed to be fully biodegradable.
> Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
But yes, this and the usability issue make the other points moot (n.b. leaching harmful chemicals is a concern that also applies to plastic straws and paper cups). The vast majority of existing straws should be replaced with no straw, and most beyond that with reusable straws.
Soggy is not a problem.Recycling paper involves wetting it to loose the fibres and then reforming it. It's how paper is made.
> Soggy is not a problem.
It is when you're trying to suck a thick milkshake through one, though...
But usually paper and cardboard that has been in contact with food is not recyclable because it contaminates the batch. That's why pizza boxes also cannot go into the cardboard/paper fraction.
No, that's because pizza boxes are contaminated with fat. That messes up the paper recycling process. Water is fine.
> Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
Uhh.. yes? Trees can be grown, just like any agriculture product.
> Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
In theory. However that rarely works out in practice, due to the complications of mixing various types of plastic in a single stream of garbage.
> Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
The glue for paper straws will be a biodegradable water-based adhesive. It may be finished with natural wax. And that's it. I think you are intentionally spreading FUD saying glue and chemicals.
That being said, I hate paper straws. I like bamboo straws though.
I'm convinced paper straws are a psy-op by the plastics industry to make us hate environmentalists.
> Why do small if you can go big right away?
You're missing the fact that this sort of infrastructure requires a robust business case. That's why scale is critical.
Recycling bottles and cans has a solid business case. Glass and aluminium are straight forward to recycle at an industrial scale, but would be pointless if they were kept at an artisanal scale.
Any moralistic argument is pointless if you can't put together a coherent business plan. The people you need to work and the energy you need to spend to gather and process whatever you want to process needs to come from somewhere. How many vape pens do you need to recycle per month to support employing a single person? Guilt trips from random people online don't pay that person's rent, do they?
> Everybody makes fun of paper straws.
This is specious reasoning. The core issue are tradeoffs, and what you have to tolerate or abdicate. Paper straws are a red herring because the main criticism was that, at the start, they failed to work as straws. So you were left with an industrial demand to produce a product that failed to work and was still disposable.
If you look at food packaging and containers, you are faced with more thought-provoking tradeoffs. Paper containers don't help preserve food as well as plastic ones. Packaging deteriorates if exposed to any form of moisture, and contaminates food so quickly tk the point you can taste cardboard if you leave them overnight. This leads to shorter shelf life and more food waste. Is food waste not an ecological problem? How do you manage those tradeoffs?
> 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.
It was amazing being a kid back then because you could earn some decent coin returning bottles
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.
As European that is not spread everywhere, while you can get some money back in Germany and Greece, there is none to be had in Portugal.
In Germany, it is such a big issue with people not having other source of income, that there is a culture where and how to leave the bottles around so that they are easier to collect.
there are still people today who roam neighborhoods collecting bottles and cans
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.
Listen, we can hold Big Plastic accountable and also not throw trash out of our cars, I think.
What’s something we have managed to do this with?
Maybe the process could be emulated.
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.
[1] https://www.erecycling.ch/en/privatpersonen/blog/vRB-Vorgezo...
Same here in the Netherlands. But only for larger appliances. Washing machines for instance. Smaller ones you have to be able to send for free but there are too many exceptions. My internet provider switched out the modems and simply said "it's yours now, for free!" Meaning: we don't want to pay for disposing of our inventory. I send it to their free postage address they use for broken items with a brick, since they are charged per kg.
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 (???)
https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/covered-electronic-waste...
Big tobacco strikes again!
Go further. Every product must be returned to manufacturer at end of life.
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.
> Go further. Every product must be returned to manufacturer at end of life.
Well that Charmin bear will certainly have his work cut out for him
You're thinking disposable vapes, but this will apply to quality of life appliances like washing machines as well, right?
Do you want to live in a world where only the rich can afford washing machines?
Incidentally, I don't know what you do, but once in a while I throw (carefully, li-ion batteries) my broken electronics in the trunk and bring them to the local collection center.
I don't hate the idea.
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.
Why would 2x the transportation cost be intractable, but ruining the environment, killing life in the oceans, destroying the basis of our future food production, etc, be tractable?
> 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
Agreed. Companies could “outsource” their recycling obligations to local (national, regional, whatever) providers.
Maybe they could use big trucks that just collect all refuse from the curb. And maybe that is something that the city should do so that we don’t have a dozen trucks collecting a dozen different trash cans from every house.
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)
Why past tense? That's describing exacty the world we are living in right now.
Consider that there are some things society can and should do that are independent of the profit motive, hm?
The full cost of product has externalised the waste bit, and made it the customer and societies problem.
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.
Trash piles is one way the actual cost of things is obfuscated and punted to future generations.
A lot of people wouldn’t want this because it’s asking for stuff to become more expensive for them.
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.
You don't need to get it perfect though. The right incentives get you most of the way. Perfect is the enemy of good.
I’m reading ‘The World Without Us’ by Alan’s Weisman. Last thread like this had someone recommend it (thanks!).
Every bit of plastic humans have made still exits, bar a small amount we have burnt.
That’s concerning.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_degradation_by_marine_...
You are boldly and confidently at odds with the usual explanations of the formation of oil:
* https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_formation
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum
these other sources all assert that
I think they are conflating Carboniferous Period / white rot slowing _coal_ formation with Oil formation.
> 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.
The ecosystem will be fine, the question is whether we are going to be part of it.
Mechanism design for better trash economics is hard for the same reasons that making a good linearly typed programming language is hard.
I'm not kidding :)
It's funny because I'm working on a type theory first toy language as we speak... so you're not wrong, but I'm also foolish enough to be ambitious.
Why is trash an "enormous externality"? Even if the retailer took it back it would still be... trash.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> And it just doesn't matter. It's a tiny amount of mass / volume.
Are you sure? It’s getting into food. We are eating it and drinking it, and it’s getting more prevalent.
Go on, give us some numbers.
Because 7Bn people multiplied by a few kg/year doesn't seem trivial to me, but sounds like you can prove it.
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.
Right, but there's ground and there's ground.
Geological strata vs shallow landfill sitting above aquifers and subject to near-term erosion.
Disposing of this stuff in deep mines seems like it'd be fine, unfortunately we haven't yet, at a society/economy level, found the discipline to do so. Presumably after a few mya of heat and pressure it'll be indistinguishable from other petrochemicals (which aren't particularly nice to begin with).
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.
We've produced 6-8 billion tons of plastic/plastic waste and its bulk density is much lower than water
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-plastics-productio...
It should be at a minimum stored safely. How and why are the environmental effects not a factor for you?
Regular trash is already stored safely.
The great pacific garbage patch disagrees.
Yes let’s burden any fledging company with the added bureaucracy of having to set up trash collection, disposal and recycling.
Because it has to start somewhere.
Also many countries collect disposable plastic.
Most countries don't do enough at all.
For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal.
As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place, and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke down, or call the city hall to collect it.
We should go back to the old days, when electronics were repairable, which naturally companies will lobby against, as that will break down the capitalistic curve of exponential growth in sales.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/
Based on your reply you haven't fully considered context. Smokers don't care about themselves or else they wouldn't smoke. As demonstrated by the article, you can see proof that they also don't care for the environment. What makes you think people who intentionally pay to kill themselves and then throw the waste on the ground instead of trash will ever recycle?
They should just be banned outright. In no world is this going to end up in bins 100% of the time. Disposable really means it’s destined for the trash at best, and just simply litter at worst.
This guy[1] explains the problem quite well.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU
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.
> Why single-use disposable vaping devices exist in the first place is somewhat perplexing given permanent/re-fillable ones are also available
I suspect you could make the same argument for manufactured cigarettes vs pipe tobacco. It seems people will pay for convenience.
How and why are the environmental effects not a factor for you?
I see more vape litter on the beach than bottles and cans. The deposit is part of why that is
I just received a $10 deposit refund for returning my motorcycle battery to the battery shop.
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?
Lead actually has a pretty good scrap value.
What if it worked like the carts at Aldi? Put something reasonable like 3-5 bucks on the sale amount, and redeem the same amount when returned.
Yes, that is also how the deposit on a can of soda works.
i pay 25c to leave my cart in the lot
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.
Congrats.
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.
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...
"I Powered My House Using 500 Disposable vapes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU
What a brave and adventurous soul.
If you believe Lumafield, 8% of low-quality lithium ion batteries have a mechanical defect that can sometimes lead to a short circuit.
Is this person really brave, or just unaware of the risks?
https://www.lumafield.com/article/finding-hidden-risks-in-th...
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).
Someone reversed a vape that contains a Puya Microcontroller. https://github.com/grahamwhaley/py32c642_vape
Running a web server off a disposable vape: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
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.
> Closer to 15 or 20 in greater London in the UK.
Weren't disposable vapes banned in UK in May 2025? Is the problem still that big?
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.
I haven’t been back since February last year. I guess a win for some people!
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/
We really need to ban these things.
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.
That doesn't explain why vapes are so rife elsewhere, particularly the UK. They're popular because, as the FT described, they're the ultimate product. Cool, cheap and addictive.
https://www.ft.com/content/f72f17e4-a83d-4494-b1e7-a349cc7ae...
The other reason is kids.
Kids don't have to hide proof of their consumption in their bedroom (well at least until they are hooked enough they can't spend a night without vaping). They buy, consume and throw away before reaching home.
Good intentions and lack of foresight often combine poorly.
The fault lies with vape manufacturers. It’s big tobacco. They are soulless ghouls.
Surprisingly, Big Tobacco does not really likes vapes because it's not them, and eats in their profit margin. If any, they lobby against vapes and specifically disposable vapes.
The other reason is regulatory arbitrage -- the disposal vapes are often illegal products that circumvent laws in general.
I seriously wonder how it's even feasible for these things to be profitable.
> FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables
Wait, what? Where's the sense in that?
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.
If true I wonder if that has to do with this incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lung_...
It isn't. That was illegal marijuana vapes.
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'm kind of in favor of non-persecution OTC at a pharmacy nicotine patches.
I hate anything added to the air. Even perfumes irritate and make me sneeze in high quantity.
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.
It's the habit, not the high.
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.
There were two countries in the 20th century which tried to ban alcohol. Both had a.. very lasting consequences.
You can't "just ban" it or "ban it properly". You would get a very nasty black market and things with such ban.
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.
Disclaimer: I'm a non-smoker
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.
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.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/573271/casey-costello-b...
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/579431/absolutely-ludicr...
There aren't really alcohol or cannabis junkies like heroin either. That didn't make prohibition or the war on drugs successful.
There definitely are "alcohol junkies"; we just call them alcoholics
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.
Wow that is stupid. NZ banned disposable or non-rechargeable vapes only, refillable/pod-swappable and rechargeable ones are still on sale.
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 don't think the post you're responding to is saying that vapes should be banned. Just disposable ones.
> 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.
We're not talking about alcohol or tobacco prohibition. We're talking about single use e-waste prohibition.
No, banning disposable vapes
Thanks for the clarification, I can see banning disposable vapes but still allowing reusable ones.
I think broadly prohibition didn't work but smoking bans do. Where "work" means fewer people smoke and passive smoke.
If that's how you you define work, prohibition worked.
Prohibition works to stop some people.
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?
People have been smoking for thousands of years.
People have been stealing and killing other people as many years if not longer. That doesn't mean you cannot do a bit of legislation and obtain some positive results against that.
I think not banning the cigarette and non reusable vape is the wrong solution but banning smoking in lots of public spaces has improved the situation, maybe not to curb consumption but at least non smokers can breath a little. I wish it would also applies to outdoors cafe/restaurant terraces too as smokers effectively ban to non smokers by spreading their poison around them. They could walk away for a couple of minutes to get their hit but they don't on purpose. There should be a radius around an outdoor terrace where smoking is effectively prohibited.
as a first step, let's tax these things. this is such an immense waste of electronics.
No, just let the scavengers continue collecting and reusing them.
I hate smoking, never smoked. Should the vapes be banned because of e-waste, or high school kids getting strung out, or what? It's not a world I know.
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.
Some of the COVID test kits that were popular a few years ago(!) were even more complex.
"One man's trash is another man's treasure."
Can it run Doom?
Also, it's fun to imagine someone building whole racks of these (e.g. recycled ones) for a computation farm. Or a cheap home server, whatever.
> Can it run Doom?
Yes, there are even videos showing it on youtube.
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?
Indeed: https://futurism.com/neoscope/vape-tamagotchi-interview
I think you might be joking but OK, I'll respond like you're serious as this is HN.
You want to make vaping even more addictive than it already is?
They’re making a prediction, not a value judgement.
In 40 more years I wonder what the equivalent of "same specs in a disposable vape as home computer from 80's" will be
Hosting A Website On A Disposable Vape
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-a-dispo...
And they have little displays on them, OLED displays which show the battery life and remaining fluid.
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 promise to cry if a docker container is found in there.
By 2040 there will be a disposable LLM in there as good as today's claude.
By 2080, it will be fully sentient, and derive pleasure when you use it, and suffer loneliness if you don't, and do its best to convince you.
Basically the weapons from "High on Life" or the butter robot from Rick and Morty, but as a vape.
Scheduled by k8s
the way they're discarded definitely embodies the "cattle not pets" approach
What a waste of precious resources
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.
Is this the "John Graham-Cumming", ex-CTO of cloudflare?
yes! F9 on his website links to this very blog https://jgc.org/
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.
So who is going to make some mesh firmware for these and all other garbage computers?
Cyberpunk is real.
Is this actually disposable if it has the rechargeable battery and display? Or is it maybe like a lighter that technically can be refilled but nobody ever does?
It's so curious why these things are addictive. Before I tried a vape (it was called an e-cigarette back then) I thought the addictive thing about cigarettes is the nicotine. That's part of it, but a huge part (possibly even bigger) is just the sensation of sucking in smoke/vapour from a little stick and exhaling it. Is it similar to sucking on a mother's teat or something? It really seems to satisfy in a way nothing else does.
In the UK truly disposable vapes are banned, thankfully, but I do wonder if it's now just "technically refillable" ones that people use one time. They should be taxed to the eyeballs to encourage reuse if so.
Disposable vapes waste have big environmental impact.
Use regular vapes with e-juice
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).
$5 is very expensive in the microcontroller world.
Which 10 Cent Microcontroller is Right for You? Comparing the CH32V003 to the PY32F002A.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-n7vXHAqm8
Can it run doom?
Kind of! https://www.pcmag.com/news/hacker-gets-doom-running-on-a-vap...
See also
Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252817
Hugged to death atm I guess
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.
The only realistic risk so far is addiction and a nicotine addiction doesn’t ruin lives. Other than that it’s marginally bad for the heart and so far atleast not carcinogenic.
They’re better than cigarettes, so they’re the lesser evil.
You cannot say "better" in this context without an almost endless degree of quantification that could fill textbooks. By what metric? Public health? Cost effectiveness? Environmental impact? How do we measure these things? I assume you're arguing a health perspective (which, at this point all we can say is probably better), but in the context of TFA "better" is more likely to be interpreted in an environmental context, of which I haven't really been convinced either way.
I would argue that in the context of ops complaint they are worse.
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.
-
Sounds like you're whining to be fair.
Please have a read:
https://pirg.org/resources/vape-waste-the-environmental-harm...
Edit: You were complaining about 'environmental' HN users, but now you've edited your comment. I guess you read the article and were convinced, that's great :)
> After 60,000 sucks on the teat
> 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.
There's a ridiculous amount of tech in the DNA and cellular machinery of a single bacterium.
When you poo though it doesnt require landfill and relatively less toxic.
Where do you think it goes?
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.