I love the convenience, but nobody gives a fuck about recycling or nature in the US. I called a few smoke shops on how I could recycle these disposable vapes with rechargeable batteries and they literally said to throw it in the trash.
You can simply search for a local hazard material or battery cleanup/pickup event. Most dumps will take them. But throwing them in your regular trash causes risk of fire to your house, garbage truck, and the dump. I hold onto all my old disposables to take to the dump.
I have my friends saving their empty vapes. I plan on making a backup battery out of them.
Genuinely interested, how would you go about doing that?
Tbh I found someone doing it on YouTube.
It wasn’t the InfinateSolutions’ battery video, I hope. And if you haven’t seen it, it’s a must watch classic about batteries.
It pretty much involves taking a whole bunch of batteries and setting them up in a combination of series and parallel along with resistors such that the voltage potential between the two sides matches the target voltage.
But I do believe that is missing a part of the equation. Voltage is how hard it’s pushing, but there’s also the question of how well can it replace that voltage when a circuit allows a current to flow.
Kinda like pushing something by bracing yourself against a wall vs pushing it by walking behind it. In the first case, you might be able to get it moving but the force will drop off as it moves out of reach, but the latter case will keep the force sustained until you tire.
I think that’s called voltage droop and I don’t know if it’s a significant concern for batteries. It’s based on the chemistry of the battery plus resistance of internal components (and any extra components you use to put it all together).
Though one thing that is a concern is that the voltage also drops as the battery gets low. If the circuit it powers can handle that, great. Otherwise you’ll need extra circuitry to keep the voltage steady, like voltage regulators, and that will come with a higher droop.
Edit: adding berries on series increases voltage. Adding batteries in parallel reduces voltage droop.
As a regular enjoyer of vaping (used to be a pack a day smoker), this is great news. Fuck disposable vapes because theirs nothing “disposable” about them. Plastic, electronics, metals, and lithium batteries that people just fucking throw out their car windows like cigarette butts. That shit is gonna last for thousands of years. And y’all have seen those videos of people’s phones and vapes exploding in their pockets when there’s a puncture in the battery, right? Yeah let’s just throw that shit into landfills and out of car windows and find out what happens.
Makes me wonder how many electric car batteries worth of lithium and rare earth metals is just lying in gutters around the world.
For the UK alone:
In 2022, they found more than 40 tonnes of lithium from single-use vapes was discarded, which is the same amount used to power 5,000 electric vehicles.
oh, there’s fields and fields of entire cars just sitting in all inhabited remote places. it’s becoming a real problem in Alaska. there’s towns there literally getting buried in dead cars because it’s too expensive to take them anywhere else.
generally if you think “i wonder if this type of thing is getting disposed of properly or if it’s a huge ecological problem” the answer is always the latter. the humans in charge don’t care about the environment. that’s not profitable.
Also the cells are typically in pretty good condition, as the vape tends to run out of the flavoured/nicotine liquid stuff before the battery gets down to a state of charge that is bad for long term storage.
That’s not true at all? It’s literally always the battery that runs out first. Else you would burn the coils in them.
They’re rechargeable lithium batteries, they should last years. Not a week.
True, if you could recharge them, but they don’t include ports to do so.
Which is why it’s a waste of good lithium cells, as the guy you replied to was saying
So why use rechargeable batteries at all?
Suicide drones use them too. Best energy density at the required power levels. (Zinc-air batteries are slightly better but you can’t extract the energy in minutes.)
So much that people have started making DIY stuff out of them.
I wouldn’t mind this over in the states. I see these pieces of crap strewn out all over the place outside. I see refillable ones like juuls pretty often too but not as often as the little tykes lookin disposable ones.
There used to be a massive market of regular battery/tank style vapes and juices. Around 2020 they started cracking down on flavored vaping stuff and it killed almost the entire market of vapes at the time, and left a void that is only filled now by countless disposables companies with strong as hell 5% juice. There’s simply no good options anymore if you don’t want a high concentrate disposable
Agreed.
But I just know we would get the what about muh freedom crowd who thinks freedoms should include the right to destroy yourself and everyone around you and the environment.
I sometimes wonder if the Love Canal had happened in modern America, if we would have had a movement to force it cleaned up, or if we would have a bunch of mouth-breathers demanding their right to spend too much for land tainted with industrial wastes.
Anyways, congrats to you all for putting a lid on this menace.
or if we would have a bunch of mouth-breathers demanding their right to spend too much for land tainted with industrial wastes.
Good news! America has plenty of land and water ruined by industrial and agricultural waste that it hasn’t protected. (Also lots that it has, but)
One such case was a lake that suddenly formed in a desert when an irrigation canal overflowed. It has since been fed primarily by runoff from industrial agriculture. It became a resort and tourist destination for a time, until all the birds and fish started dying and rotting on the beaches. We just let it sit there for another fifty years until farming techniques improved to where it was being fed much less, and it started drying out and causing big toxic dust storms. In the last six years or so, more than a hundred years after it formed, there’s a local Indian tribe trying to get a new canal to rehabilitate the wetlands with river water (rather than just more runoff).
It’s called the Salton Sea
This is fantastic news.
I wish they would ban it in Germany, too.
EU needs to step in
this is a direct attack on Big Clive and I won’t stand for it
I’ll miss all the free rechargeable lithium cells too, but there’s plenty of garbage vapes to keep us busy for ages as it is.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one thinking of Big Clive and his lithium battery harvesting videos
They will be imported as crazy.
Denmark already banned it, but they are everywhere. Literally everywhere. It might be the biggest “black market” right now for anything really.
They need refillable ones. Chargeable. It needs to be a product you buy, and they have it for a loooong time, only to buy more fluid.
You can’t stop it by banning it, and it’s better than smoking, so please just give us the eco friendly alternative.
You’ve got the eco friendly alternative.
What do you think people were vaping with before the disposable vapes?
They vaped with vapes with taste. That’s the only appeal for disposable ones.
They banned taste in Denmark, so it has to taste like tobacco. That’s why they import disposable now. It’s incredibly stupid.
what do you mean? there’s a million refillable options out there. have been for years. the popularity of disposables is mostly about convenience, habit (it’s similar to buying cigarettes), and laziness. it’s a great example of how much people just don’t give a shit. it’s actually waaaay cheaper in the long run to use a refillable one. gives a better experience with more flavor options too. but it’s maybe 5% less convenient to use. therefore only about 5% of users go for that.
i fucking hate human nature.
i have like 5 friends in trying to convince away from the disposables right now. I’m 3 years in, and may have one that would be willing to try it i bought it for him. it’s so fucking hard to change anyone’s buying habits. i don’t get why. these are all people that SAY they care about the environment. then i show them an easy to fix way that they are FUCKING INCREDIBLY AWFUL to the environment and they just shrug…
I was lucky enough to just quit the nicotine habit about a year ago
Long story short the refillable ones are more expensive and still have a pretty high failure rate with regular maintenance.
Now that being said I understand not everyone actually does the regular maintenance.
Basically people can’t afford $150 box mod to break on them and then they’re fucked.
Buying a disposable for 50$ a month ( I don’t know the real numbers or whatever I’m just guesstimating here) at least they know it’s not going to break on them before it runs out of juice
Something like that
Because I literally told my friend about the disposable they problem and she took time to explain why she used disposables.
For a lot of people it’s as simple as the best available option to continue their habit.
Shit ain’t right but it is what it is.
I’m ashamed to say by now I have bought five total of the Indi 1g disposable vapes. The marijuana oil type.
I have not thrown a single one of them away although they have long been empty. I prefer to just buy standard cartridges. Which also have a bit of waste but no lithium
I don’t think your information is quite right here. A nice (nice as in kind of the best that I’m aware of) pod style vape is about $30. A bigger box mod is under $60 for the ones I like from Vaporesso or Voopoo. Juice is let’s say liberally, $40/mo (120ml). I have been handing down vape mods for almost a dozen years. My buddy vapes a lot and he’s been using my hand-me-down vape for two years and it was 5 years old when I gave it to him. I only buy new because they get a little worn and I like the shiny screen and buttons. Absolutely all still usable. Best I can tell, disposables are about $10 for 3-4 days (according my partner who is annoyingly using disposables for “convenience”). You can get a nice mod and juice every month for the price of disposables from the real world numbers I’m seeing.
100% I was guesstimating numbers to make a point.
Your info way more valid I’m sure
Just quit then, millions have. I have more respect for people still smoking cigarettes tbqh.
As I mentioned I really don’t use nicotine at all anymore
I have a couple of marijuana THC Vapes
I feel like I mentioned that pretty specifically
Haven’t rechargeable ones been available way longer than disposable ones?
Denmark is a bit different though. They’ve cracked down on all flavours except menthol and tobacco, and they’ve taxed it similar to cigarettes. The UK is only banning disposable vapes.
Is that not already a thing over there? Refillable tanks with replaceable coils and batteries have been a thing for over a decade in the states. They were the original vaping devices as far as I know. Then companies started making this “disposable” crap.
We should build some kind of a moat around the UK. If we manage that, while not full proof, I have no doubt that banning it in the UK will be easier to do than somewhere without a moat.
Oh bummer. I thought we were running low on e-waste in the world.
