Interesting thing about li-ion batteries, is they have much less lithium in them than disposable lithium coin cell batteries, and hold much more charge. If we're outlawing disposable li-ions we should outlaw those as well.
We're OK with disposable alkaline batteries, so what makes lithium worse? If anything, alkaline batteries might have a slightly worse environmental footprint due to the use of manganese.
The problem with lithium batteries is that they can catch on fire, but that's a problem only when charged (or charging). A fully discharged battery shouldn't do much.
> We're OK with disposable alkaline batteries, so what makes lithium worse?
No we're not. Disposable batteries should not be a thing anywhere, especially not in products where they cannot easily be removed by design. Alkaline batteries may not combust when damaged, but their internal juice leaking out is damn corrosive.
> A fully discharged battery shouldn't do much.
Even that is enough to light trash compactor trucks or the heaps on waste collection plants to fire. This shit is becoming a massive problem for the trash hauler and processing industry. One in Australia blames 35 (!) fires a day in the country... no surprise if 1.8 million of them are sold a week [1]. This is frankly insane, and the rise in trash fires directly corresponds with disposable vapes.
Additionally, we need every bit of lithium we can get for electric vehicles and other stuff. Not for throwaway devices.
Indeed these things are an abomination. I regularly find half consumed vapes at intersections where they have clearly been accidentally dropped and abandoned by cyclists. I have a nice collection of perfectly good lithium batteries.
Just spitballing here, but considering that at typical intersections, automobile traffic outnumbers cyclist traffic by at least 100:1, isn't it more likely that those vapes were throw out the window of a car when someone got frustrated they clogged or something? (I'm not a vaper, but I've heard of clogged vapes being a common occurrence).
> I regularly find half consumed vapes at intersections where they have clearly been accidentally dropped and abandoned by cyclists. I have a nice collection of perfectly good lithium batteries.
If true, then the hedonism and pleasure seeking (the homeostatic pleasure trap is a monkey trap) found within the big, global industrial complex is meant for a small set of secret hackers to take advantage of by collecting disposed "vape" or smoking pleasure devices for powering some cool nerd contraptions.
Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty when you pick up trash. Because capitalism produces treasure when it excretes its waste products.
You just have to be outside the capitalist world-system to do this cool trick.
I've collected a few of them and they are robust and rechargable batteries. A common battery is
IP17350 1100mAh 4.07Wh
(Date of manufacture the one I see on the one I'm holding is 20210613).
Anyone got any idea to use them besides small flashlights? They also have a pressure sensor on the LED and a nice metal case pretty often.
Depending on the battery there are cheap AliExpress boards - or diy - to make tiny UPSes for a raspberry pi or other usb-powered device. I don't know for that specific battery; I have some that take 18650s, though.
One 18650 can get you several hours of runtime for a pi zero. The battery can cost more than the zero. The cheaper one cell UPS boards are about $2 (plus shipping).
An advantage of single cell UPSes is that you don't have to worry about balancing, which is a bit of a pain with scavenged cells.
The rechargeable lithium batteries in those really doesn't fit the "lithium shortage" and "we don't have enough battery capacity to build an EV for everyone" narrative
It takes around 850g of lithium carbonate to produce one kWh of lithium batteries. The current market price for lithium carbonate is about $14/kg. The base spec Tesla Model 3 has a 57.5kWh battery pack, so the lithium in the pack represents a cost of ~$685, or just under 2% of the list price of the vehicle.
A typical disposable vape contains about five cents worth of lithium.
Another post in this thread mentions 1.8 million disposable vapes being sold per week in Australia. So that corresponds to 131 EV batteries per week. Or roughly 48000 EV batteries per year. 87000 EVs were registered in Australia in 2023.
Make of that what you want, but disposable electronics to administer nicotine seem to be a major waste.
The materials for one EV battery can make ~30 e-bikes, and currently EVs are too expensive for most people.
The way to fix that and the way that industry is fixing it is to make batteries more efficient (higher-density, new anodes/cathodes) in parallel with making a bunch more of them (and mining more lithium).
If we succeed in making a $25k EV, the batteries used in those vapes will be _even cheaper_.
I don’t think it’s desirable and I find the waste appalling, but I do think that disposable batteries can only be expected to grow without intervention.
A popular theory is that they use "QC reject" grade, as the batteries often have arount 800 mAh capacity, two times less than most basic commercial grade.
Hopefully zero! Still, if you replace your car (or its battery) every 10 years (pretty long IMO) and smoke one vape a day (yikes), you'll use more cells on your car than your vapes.
I would hope that too. I imagine that as long as the pack still works, most cars will be sold forward on the used market. If the pack fails (either due to cell death or a crash or whatever), I bet many of them will not be properly recycled, especially from the early days. Once most cars are EVs, recycling will probably get better.
Either way, it seems pretty unfair to assume that EV packs will be 100% recycled, while vape packs will be 0% recycled. One could imagine a sort of "core charge" for disposable vapes. Bring the vape back for recycling when you get a new one and get $2 off. This could even be done by law like California CRV for cans and bottles.
The kind of people who can afford to buy EVs buy a new car what, every 3 years? So I guess about 1/3 of a car (or, using the numbers from another comment, about 4000 vapes' worth).
The lithium in those cheap disposable things are less "lithium" and more "metallic powder/paste that theoretically contains elements of lithium." It's not something you'd want to actually use in anything important like a car battery
Not true. "Disposable" vapes use commodity li-ion cells, of the same basic type that you'd find in a cellphone, a laptop or an EV. They probably aren't the best quality, but there's nothing unusual about the chemistry or packaging. Li-ion cells are the preferred chemistry because of the very high discharge rate - alkaline or primary lithium cells just can't deliver enough current. The cell is perfectly capable of being recharged, but some people prefer the convenience of a disposable device and manufacturers are quite happy to respond to that demand.
It's wasteful, I don't particularly approve of it, I expect to see a lot of jurisdiction ban disposable vapes, but nor do I think it's particularly egregious or meaningfully impacting on the commodity price of lithium carbonate.
some people prefer the convenience of a disposable device
I don't understand this. Instead of plugging it into a charger, they'd rather go to the store to buy another, or more likely order online and wait for it to be delivered?
i don't have personal experience with this, but i imagine so, because if you plug your vape into a charger, you can smoke it in an hour or two, and if you buy a cigarette at the convenience store that's a block away, you can smoke it in two minutes
maybe you live somewhere without convenience stores
I introduced a battery charger to a group of people that used disposable vapes and the knowhow to charge them. It changed the way they interacted with the vapes completely even saying funny high ideas like "we should patent this".
Selling consumer devices with Li-Ion batteries that are designed to not be rechargeable, should be banned altogether.